Over the weekend, Wikipedian-in-Chief Jimmy Wales decreed that all links on the site would be tagged as “No Follow.” That means, in essence, that the links become invisible to search engines like Google’s. The engines won’t take the links into account in ranking search results. Wikipedia is adopting the policy to reduce spammers’ incentives to add spam links to the encyclopedia. I wonder, though, if it could also have the effect of reinforcing Wikipedia’s hegemony over search results. The sources cited in Wikipedia, many of which are original sources, will no longer get credit for their appearance there, which should cause at least a little downward pressure in their own search rankings (hence providing a little more upward pressure, relatively speaking, for Wikipedia’s articles). Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any.
UPDATE: Search engine expert Philipp Lenssen seems to agree:
Such a change in Wikipedia, with [its] millions of pages – many of which rank excellent in Google and have a high PageRank – has a potentially strong impact on Google search results. Google relies on links to determine its result rankings, and thus huge amount of outgoing links on Wikipedia do their share in influencing that …
What happens as a consequence, in my opinion, is that Wikipedia gets valuable backlinks from all over the web, in huge quantity, and of huge importance – normal links, not “nofollow” links; this is what makes Wikipedia rank so well – but as of now, they’re not giving any of this back. The problem of Wikipedia link spam is real, but the solution to this spam problem may introduce an even bigger problem: Wikipedia has become a website that takes from the communities but doesn’t give back, skewing web etiquette as well as tools that work on this etiquette (like search engines, which analyze the web’s link structure). That’s why I find Wikipedia’s move very disappointing.
Seth Finkelstein also comments on the move.
UPDATE: Amit Agarwal provides an illustration of how the no-follow rule may affect other sites, particularly smaller ones:
Say you discover a cool feature in the iPod (called Stylus) and blog about it. Tomorrow, the Wikipedia contributors append the details of iPod Stylus (your discovery) to the Wikipedia page on iPod. They do attribute your blog but search engines will never see that attribution (or read your blog via Wikipedia) because of the rel=nofollow tag. Now that Wikipedia enjoys higher credibility and trust (read PageRank), the search algorithms will rank the Wikipedia iPod page higher than yours (for queries like iPod Stylus) because the search engine bots are not aware that Wikipedia’s content is actually based on your blog page. Result, your site appears after Wikipedia in the “iPod Stylus” search results and you get less or no traffic while Wikipedia gets to enjoy all the fruits of your labor.
UPDATE: Shelley Powers suggests that the best solution may be for search engines to ignore not only links from Wikipedia but links to Wikipedia as well:
Wikipedia is now one of those rare sources on the web that has a golden door. In other words, it doesn’t need an entry point through a search engine for people to ‘discover’ it. If anything, its appearance in search engine results is a distraction. It would be like Google linking to Yahoo’s search result of a term, or Yahoo linking to Google’s: yeah, we all know they’re there but show me something new or different.
Interesting.
UPDATE: The official announcement from Wikipedia says that the no-follow tags are being added “for now,” so this may be a temporary measure intended to frustrate an immediate spam threat.
UPDATE: Andy Beard distills the problem nicely. (But what’s with those snowflakes?)
Back to the for-profit Wikia search engine in the pipe. Is this a threat to Google? Can Wales make a buck out of it? Will it be better than Google?
Down the road, maybe it would make better sense for Google to index everything BUT Wikipedia…
Paul, let me make sure I understand, is your answer to my question of “In his-word-against-mine, why do you believe a reporter over the person being written about?”, that someone who claims a reporter is wrong always counts as “has an agenda” [“to push within the pages of Wikipedia”], but the reporter is not ever counted as “has an agenda” [since they’re not writing on Wikipedia]? This isn’t much of a answer – it’s pretty much just restating that you believe reporters over other people all the time. Your answer is basically circular – the question *presupposes* a difference between the reporter and the person being written about.
“Would you rather have a history written by the participants, or their hangers-on?” – Well, my question is why the participants are *ignored* and all power is vested in what’s previously written by “old white guys who have ultimate editing authority, … educated by old white guys … geared exclusively to the tastes of old white guys.”.
I mean, you write such sneering, dismissive, belittling takes on people who feel aggrieved by those old white guys, and how what those old white guys write is the proper source of knowledge (“what an encyclopedia is for”) … and then you tell us how different Wikipedia is from Encyclopedia Britannica.
In fact, you’re essentially arguing Wikipedia is more British than the British – you won’t even deign to acknowledge a journalist might get it wrong in writing about a person, which is really amazing.
Don’t you see ANY problem here? How there’s a problem between that “old-white-guy”-institution fetish, and the claims of being avant-guarde?
Seth, my answer to that question is: The question is irrelevant to discussions about Wikipedia, because an encyclopedia is not where such debates should take place.
Encyclopedias are not small claims tribunals where sources can argue the toss with journalists or academics about their works. Perhaps there should be a site unconnected to Wikipedia where arguments between journalists and sources can be played out in full and in public. Then Wikipedia can link to that. However, such a debate is not suitable for the pages of an encyclopedia.
You seem to think encyclopedias should be about finding the One Truth, where its authors quest to discover the true meaning of everything. This is a fallacy. Encyclopedia authors should make every effort NOT to make judgments. As their verifiability rule states: “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth”. You seem to be having trouble grasping this concept, Seth.
Encyclopedias are not meant at all to be canonical repositories of every fact about every subject. They were only ever designed as starting points for further research. Only stupid people would want encyclopedias to contain the static “truth” and not be part of an ongoing dialogue, because that would encourage them not to think, not to make their own intellectual decisions.
Paul, I’m going to try one more time, since you keep begging the question, I’m afraid I’m repeating myself: What do you *mean* by “none of the institutional infrastructure that Nick has been brought up to worship”, except we-work-free! and don’t socially respect the idea of *individual* expertise (indeed, are socially hostile towards the very concept, as part of the motivation for getting unpaid labor out of suckers). I think we’ve established that Wikipedia has a slavish, dogmatic, worship of the “old-white-guy” institutional idea of *knowledge* (and, playing armchair analyst, in a way that’s a classic example of insecurity and defensiveness). You appear to have trouble with the concept that this idea is even arguable (I should hasten to say I’m pretty devoted to it myself, but I do understand it’s not unchallenged, and it has some notable downsides, most strongly felt by those non-white or not-guys.).
I grasp the concept of “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth”, I just boggle at someone who thinks it’s a good idea, and *at the same time* can flame about old-white-guyness and claim some sort of revolutionary stance . While perhaps not exactly a contradiction, it does seem to be a kind of bona-fide doublethink.
Please note, repeating some variation of “Encyclopedia” is *defined* to be what’s previously written by “old white guys who have ultimate editing authority, … educated by old white guys … geared exclusively to the tastes of old white guys.”, is just going around the doublethink outlined above. The issue isn’t the definition, it’s why you hold this old-white-guys definition as sacrosanct, yet claim Wikipedia is something different in terms of institutional infrastructure (excepting again the difference that it’s free labor and demagogic motivation).
[P.S.: Call me stupid, but I don’t WANT any “ongoing dialogue” where some ranter off the street has the same conversational weight as an expert who has studied the topic for decades – everybody may have a right to an opinion, but their opinons are not equally right].
Seth, you keep making wrong statements. Wikipedia does not lack respect for individual expertise. It merely does not want its articles to be written by a person who relies on their expertise alone and can not back up their assertions with citations and references. If someone with individual expertise wants to write an argumentative essay elsewhere on the Internet which displays all of that expertise in high-quality prose, then that essay will most likely be linked to on Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia is not the place to publish argumentative essays.
As for my statement about institutional infrastructure, the difference is between Newtonian theory and quantum theory, determinism and probabilistic logic. Wikipedia’s philosophy is seated firmly in the quantum camp, whereby there can be no objective Truth, only subjective observations made by sentient humans. The natural extrapolation is that anyone trying to assert a single Truth is trying to distort reality. Thus Wikipedia can only refer to external data and must let the reader decide on their own personal truth.
This does not mean that ranters have the same conversational weight as experts. Another implication of using quantum logic is that each outcome has a probability. Each article effectively assigns a probability for each statement contained within it via the language constructs used around those statements. This is another crucial point: yes, old-white-guy sources are included and are often assigned high probability by the author, but the alternative sources are also included, no matter how wacky – unlike the EB – and are ranked accordingly. At least, that’s the theory.
Quantum theory may be many decades old, but it is still revolutionary when compared to many cultural institutions which are still mired in 19th century traditions. Insecurity, you accuse me of? The very building blocks of reality are insecure. More people should realise that.
>>>[Paul writes..]Do you remember what online research was like before the one-two punch of Wikipedia and Google? Research on the Web was far more difficult, using clunky search engine interfaces which often took 20+ pages to results to get to the real meat. At the very least, Wikipedia is a baseline from which to grow your knowledge.
“Research on the Web” is an oxymoron and your last sentence is particularly terrifying to me.
I’ve done my fair share of research in Graduate School (Literary Criticism, thank you) and know plenty about digging deep, synthesizing materials, cross referencing bibliographies and periodical journals (many of which are NOT indexed by Google or consumer search engines) – and Google and Wikipedia represent the fluff at the top of knowledge (some would argue that its the cream) rather than the depth. In time, this will most likely change (I hope) through vehicles such as Google Scholar and other periodical search engines.
[Side Note: This might be shocking to you – I’m not an Old White Guy, I’m a Young Hispanic from South Texas]
A legitimate “researcher” isn’t going to waste his or her time “Googling” or “Wikipeding” for clues.
Relying on Google or the Wikipedia as a “great place to start” is equivalent to asking a mob for directions or voting for the prom queen – they represent a popular consensus of what the mob believes to be ‘important’ and ‘relevant’ not a true representation of (or even a slice) of what is really ‘out there.’
And, it saddens me that High Schoolers are quick to substitute laziness for rigouer when urged to ‘dig deep for answers’ and ‘challenge authority’ and their first instinct is to search google or wikipedia.
Perhaps the idea of “traditional” research has already been retired to the Halls of Valhalla or the Elysian Fields.
“Legitimate researchers” normally wouldn’t bother with print encyclopedias either, so I’m not sure what your point is. Encyclopedias are about delivering summaries of general knowledge to the masses. If a high schooler visits Wikipedia and nothing else, that’s their problem, it’s not a flaw of Wikipedia. The very same criticism could be leveled at print encyclopedias.
Or is your complaint that Wikipedia is too easy to access? Maybe everyone should be forced to go to libraries to learn things, like in the olden days.
(Just a note, I slightly grammar-corrected the part of my post Nick quoted… with thanks to Nick!)
I’ve been hearing wikipedia get a lot of negative press over using no follow. Personally i prefer it this way as it gives more creditability to the information being posted, knowing its not someone making up information to get his site promoted.
This being said though the biggest threat to wikipedia is definitely its censoring by government organisations, and them using it as a propaganda tool.
So this “nofollow” feature means that Wikipedia copies and slightly modifies the results of the work of others and then points to the source but does not help the search engine score of the source. On its technical merits, I agree with the decision. The links should point to supporting material based on a user clicking through and not just for traffic for that site.
I find the notion thatv Wikipedia skims off the results and eventually takes full credit for owning that knowledge. That must be a lot like skimming money off the world economy by working for an options trading company. That must be a lot like what Wikipedia is almost certainly doing in effect every year when a new edition of Encyclopedia Britannica comes out: just skim off the new results and incorporate them into Wikipedia, like skimming cream out of a bucket of milk. But what happens when the cow dies?