Wikipedia is Unfair
Right on the heels of the nofollow issue we discover that one of the more popular sites lately that have the best link juice has learned to become picky with the sites it links to. Sure, Wikipedia is quite generous in linking to external sites—especially since the user-contributed encyclopedia relies on verifiable external sources. However, it turns out that Wikipedia has been favoring some sites and giving them the full strength of their linklove, while others get only a link with the nofollow tag attached.
The links to Wikia that don’t have the nofollow tag are created using a special Wikipedia tag wikiasite:. The tag for linking to Wikia pages isn’t mentioned in the help pages for Wikipedia, but there are many references to it throughout Wikipedia and the talk pages on various topics. It is a special type of link known as an Interwiki link, which means that you can use special shortcut tags when linking to other Wiki’s (such as Wikia). The question is, why wouldn’t the nofollow policy apply to inter-wiki links? Specifically since there is an apparent conflict of interest with Wikia, something that you would think that the Wikia team would want to avoid.
For those not in the know, Wikia is a for-profit spinoff of Wikipedia, co-founded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales. Wikia mostly targets communities, and is considered a wiki farm, being a wiki-hosting service.
Sure, it’s all right to profit from content and other information you serve up to your users. We have no problem with that. But if the playing field is not level, if you take advantage of your position and power to get ahead, then I think there’s something wrong with how you do business.
I think Wikipedia has very good content but I would like to know moere about that matter.
Justin
seedubai.blogspot.com
Justin said this on May 1, 2007 4:06 am