Nofollow and Wikis

January 12, 2008

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There is no such thing as a free link. No matter what the person who is selling you it tells you. And the web will always adapt to make it so. Even if its hard work.

Barry Schwartz posted Wikipedia added nofollows to external links. Perhaps they'll perk up to discover that Wired's semi-Wikipedia challenger has no such blocking

The post proceeded to give advice and instructions for how to spam the Wikipedia made a mistake implementing nofollow. While blogs have one or a couple authors, a few commenters, and many readers -- wikis have many authors and many readers. In an a wide open wiki, just one possible configuration, you can't tell who is trustable or accountable given the missing identity and reputation layers of the web.

There are other wiki spam countermeasures

If you enable nofollow, every link gives no value, regardless of its value, and that value is best defined by the community using it

Part of how wikis deal with spam is the