Author: mathias.schindler
Description:
De.wp currently has rel="nofollow" in every weblink on to other site. It is save
to assume that there are enough eyeballs to watch for hyperlinks to assure that
all weblinks are relevant to a given article.
En.wp has nofollow disabled as well.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
It's not safe to assume this, as proved on en.wikipedia.org.
After further discussion it will be restored to full use
there as well.
mathias.schindler wrote:
According to http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseExternalLinks.htm,
de.wp has about 500.000 weblinks. These weblinks have to follow the rules which
are displayed at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Weblinks and are the
finest the web has to offer about a given topic. The Nofollow tag may be useful
to wikis with less attention, with less content or without the expressed will to
provide useful hyperlinks.
A verbose discussion might be helpful to determine whether the usage of nofollow
in this way is even intentional according to
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
This whole feature does not directly apply to humans but any machine that has a
PageRank-like style in finding relevant pages.