Wikipedia Snubs Contributors
Everyone is talking about it, so I might as well too. I think it is utter crap that Wikipedia has decided to implement the rel=nofollow tag in its articles. They raised over $1 million in their yearly fundraising efforts, surely they can give their contributors the chance to link to their personal sites. I think this is going to backfire on them. A big reason they get so many quality contributions is because, yes, contributors used to get something out of it aside from just doing something for the good of it. Yes, sometimes we can be generous with our time, but lets show some appreciation and let our links stand.
People are already starting to put nofollow in their links to wikipedia. Eventually, this will probably hurt them to some degree. I know they are trying to combat spam, even the creator of wordpress says that when they added them to the software it didn’t really have an effect in the long run.
I think contributing is very similar to volunteer work. You initially get involved becuase it feels good to do the right thing. But in organizations, you get to meet other people, make contacts, make friends, etc. You have a chance to gain something from your volunteer work or in the long run, would you continue volunteering when your efforts went unappreciated? What do you think? Do you contribute just for the satisfaction of doing something nice?
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January 23rd, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Hmm, I’m not convinced. People who contribute still get recognition in the old way. Click on their name, read their profile, follow the link to their blog. That’s got way more value that cropping up high on Google for random searches.
The only real benefit a high pagerank has is on your AdSense earnings, and the vast majority of blogs only make pin money from than as it is.
There’s an interesting discussion on Jay Allen’s blog from when nofollow was introduced which touches on this subject.
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I think it depends on your motives though. Yes, you can read someones profiles and link to them. One site that I help out on gets TONS of referring links from Wikipedia, which is fine for us.
But I know alot of people contribute to Wikipedia in order to help their page rank and an incoming link from a PR 7 Wikipedia page can definitely affect it.
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Couple of things. If your primary motivation is to increase your pagerank then that’s a little suspect to me. Of course I don’t know people’s motive but having suffered a PR of 5 myself (spam, dumb comments, irrelevant stats) I have to wonder why people want it if it’s not to game AdSense.
Secondly, PageRank is a construction of Google designed to find the most relevant sites for a search query. By gaming it with irrelevant links it loses its effectiveness and has to be tweaked. For all we know Google might have been de-emphasising links from Wikipedia user pages because they’re not producing useful results. It’s not set in stone and, outside of Google it doesn’t mean anything.
If you want readers and want Google to index you, write good content. People will link to it legitimately on their blogs and such and you will get your pagerank. If you try to game the system you’ll just clog up Google with irrelevant pages and nobody wins.
And at the end of the day the outgoing links are still going to be on Wikipedia and people will still follow them. The difference is these are people who might actually find the content useful rather than those who come through Google because the PR was artificially boosted.
January 25th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
My page rank is a negative 3, is that good?