Wikipedia more or less has "de facto" senior editors, anyway - Wikipedians who spend a lot of time editing all sorts of article for grammar, content, etc. I read a statistic once (can't remember the numbers) saying that a huge percentage of their edits (upwards of 80) are done by a rather small number of people.
A personal experience I have with this is a friend who was upset about the political situation in his home country and began editing the offending political candidate's bio by purposely mispelling the politician's first name, inserting ridiculous statements, etc. One of the editors consistently corrected it every time, and then he must have reported it because the admin-y people froze the entry for a couple days. There's no reason they can't police links in the same way, I think.
Still, that does mean they're spending a considerable amount of human effort on a Sisyphean chore.
Also, spam is more likely to be automated, and distributed. A person with a political bone to pick isn't as likely to be using software to automatically post edits to assorted chosen pages at random time intervals, from a number of different network addresses, etc.
My point was just that they already have volunteers policing everything...do you really think it would be that much more work to get rid of cruddy links?
That solution is decent for blogs (and, in fact, is in place in many), but with a wiki, users can edit the actual articles on the site, and not just make comments.
You say Wikipedia gets content and authority from the resources it cites, yet does not recommend them to search engines.
In your gut you wonder if this is violating some implicit contract. But how does Wikipedia know that the resource it cites wants to show up on the search engines? It certainly is not unthinkable that someone out there has low bandwidth, or a grudge against google, or some hangup, and would prefer to opt out. So, Wikipedia can't assume anything about a reference's preferences, therefore arguably the least intrusive option would be the most ethical, which would be nofollow.
However, Wikipedia going nofollow does change the search engine's results, and that is irksome, since some quite good sites will lose ranking. But if they lose out anyway because Wikipedia is overcome with spam links, what's the difference?
I doubt that the kind of publish-and-hide preferences that you're suggesting are all that numerous (and they would be better enforced in other ways) :-)
In any case, it just seems like there might be a violation of an open culture social norm that is fairly central to Wikipedia. I'm still thinking about it though.
I'd say that, if they were the only choices, it be better to have Wikipedia implement nofollow than to have Wikipedia de-listed by the major search engines. Although I guess it depends on exactly how the search engines implement things.
Yeah, given the light of day I'd have to say the publish-and-hide idea is a bit shakey. Implicit in being on the internet, you are allowing links to your material, citation of it, et cetera. Like the act of driving on a public street implies that police can search your car.
I appreciate that you're not outright against nofollow, it just raises the hairs on the back of your neck. And I know you think there is a better way out there, even if no one has thought of it yet.
Arguably though, Wikipedia has the right/need/obligation to put its own self preservation ahead of internet norms or search engine's best interests.
If I were to find this business irritating, it would be because wikipedia is refusing to play the whole game just because the rules aren't totally fair. The whole "nofollow" thing seems like a bit of an algorithmic cop-out...sort of like hand-classifying pages...there's something about it that bugs me.
It reminds me of how they used to use meta tags for search engines -- and maybe they still do, but it's been awhile since I cared. It's hand-classification, and it's not gonna work anyway.
Some links on wikipedia are good, some are spam, and the question is how to tell the two apart.
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A personal experience I have with this is a friend who was upset about the political situation in his home country and began editing the offending political candidate's bio by purposely mispelling the politician's first name, inserting ridiculous statements, etc. One of the editors consistently corrected it every time, and then he must have reported it because the admin-y people froze the entry for a couple days. There's no reason they can't police links in the same way, I think.
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Also, spam is more likely to be automated, and distributed. A person with a political bone to pick isn't as likely to be using software to automatically post edits to assorted chosen pages at random time intervals, from a number of different network addresses, etc.
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In your gut you wonder if this is violating some implicit contract. But how does Wikipedia know that the resource it cites wants to show up on the search engines? It certainly is not unthinkable that someone out there has low bandwidth, or a grudge against google, or some hangup, and would prefer to opt out. So, Wikipedia can't assume anything about a reference's preferences, therefore arguably the least intrusive option would be the most ethical, which would be nofollow.
However, Wikipedia going nofollow does change the search engine's results, and that is irksome, since some quite good sites will lose ranking. But if they lose out anyway because Wikipedia is overcome with spam links, what's the difference?
Reply
In any case, it just seems like there might be a violation of an open culture social norm that is fairly central to Wikipedia. I'm still thinking about it though.
I'd say that, if they were the only choices, it be better to have Wikipedia implement nofollow than to have Wikipedia de-listed by the major search engines. Although I guess it depends on exactly how the search engines implement things.
Reply
I appreciate that you're not outright against nofollow, it just raises the hairs on the back of your neck. And I know you think there is a better way out there, even if no one has thought of it yet.
Arguably though, Wikipedia has the right/need/obligation to put its own self preservation ahead of internet norms or search engine's best interests.
Reply
It reminds me of how they used to use meta tags for search engines -- and maybe they still do, but it's been awhile since I cared. It's hand-classification, and it's not gonna work anyway.
Some links on wikipedia are good, some are spam, and the question is how to tell the two apart.
Reply
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