But see what a good flack he is? Now all my criticism, no matter how accurate and well-supported, can be neutralized with a personal attack on me. Wikipedia has a very creepy underside to it in terms of the fanaticism it fosters.

Anyway, Florence Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, has now come out with a different position:

“Either all links (external and interwiki) should be nofollow
Or none of them should be.”

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-May/070291.html

I will admit I am amused to see David lashing out furiously in the wake of this reversal. The subsequent spinning is well-done, but it’s got to hurt to go out and be an aggressive attack dog throwing mud on all the critics, and then find out his boss (?) is validating those very concerns.

Dear SEO spammers and Googlemancers: go away. We actively don’t care about your page rank.

Our responsibility as a top 10 site is to our readers. Our responsibility is not to a third party (search engine optimisers) to make them look good to a fourth party (Google). People whose interest in Wikipedia is page rank are in no way, shape or form our constituency. Because their interest is, fundamentally, spamming.

Pagerank is not a consideration for Wikipedia – it contributes nothing to the project of writing an encyclopedia. This is why SEOs and Googlemancers find it so hard to find anyone at Wikipedia or Wikimedia who cares.

The interwiki map is for the convenience of the projects. Not for the SEO spammers.

nb: Seth’s beef is that I kicked him off the wikien-l list because he was trying to troll for column material.

Who benefits from link grading? The search engines do! Maybe they should do the link grading and bear the associated cost. C’mon, search engines, you already have a scheme for ranking the trustworthiness of sites. How hard could it be to say that if a nofollowed link points to a trusted site, count it? That would make us all happy.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-April/070170.html
“Dear SEO spammers and Googlemancers: go away. We actively don’t care about your page rank.”
[Wikipedia's UK press flack]

To be clear, I support nofollow. I think site owners should be able to flag if they want a link to pass credit or not. I have no beef with Google pushing (and two other search engines joining with them) this attribute out there two years ago. And it most definitely is a standard, one adopted by the major search engines along with many other blog software makers.

Nofollow indeed means we don’t vouch for this link. As you say, Google could choose to ignore that if they want. They say they don’t, but they could.

But my beef remains with Wikipedia in the sense that it could, if it wants, start to build a trusted link rather than the blanket view that all external links have to be denied credit. I think that’s especially an issue for Wikipedia given how much it benefits from inbound links.

Exactly. Google started link politics, Wikipedia is just conducting damage control.

If nofollowing some of their links means less spam, who cares what it means to Google?

Their site their links.

Rather than meaning “don’t count this link,” nofollow should mean, “we aren’t vouching for this link.” Maybe Google could make up another convention to explain things more clearly. How about rel=”novouch”?

Personally, if Wikipedia can vet a subset of sites to be trusted, I’d like to see them go beyond that. Plenty of trusted sites have helped make Wikipedia what it is by the links we send to them. It’s not just content alone that shoots Wikipedia to the top of practically every Google search. It’s hundreds and thousands of trusted sites saying Wikipedia is a good resource. In turn, that traffic helps make it appealing for more people to participate in Wikipedia.

In return, I think many sites would feel basic fairness would be met if Wikipedia didn’t adopt some type of “it’s them against us” attitude when it comes to external links. It can’t be that hard to start growing a list over time of sites Wikipedia considers trustworthy. That would be helpful internally for Wikipedia editors, plus removing nofollow from links to these sites might help win Wikipedia some support it has lost recently.

If the righteous people over at wikipedia don’t want to play nice then why not stop linking to them if it bothers you so much. Or better yet – why not stop contributing to their site altogether?

Wikipedia reminds me of the self important schmuks over at the DMOZ and should soon be following them out the “We used to have a good thing” door. C-ya Wikipedia and don’t let that door hit you on the ass on your way out!