Well the inevitable has finally happened. Wikipedia has added a nofollow tag to all outgoing links. It does not matter how long your link has been there, it now has nofollow. This is supposed to be combating the recent barrage of spam that people are adding to articles, to boost their page rank.
Advantages
This as far as Wikipedia’s quality goes is definitely a good thing. Spammers will have absolutely no reason to add bogus links to articles. Google or any other major search engine will not follow their links anymore. Typically a link is added to Wikipedia simply for the PR boost, and not to drive traffic.
Disadvantages
However it does have a lot of negatives. First of all the spammers use bots/scripts to add their links to Wiki articles. This means that in the short term this will have little effect on spam. The bots will still be running despite nofollow. I should mention that by default WordPress blogs use nofollow for comment spam, yet I still recieve hundreds of spam comments a day. The original sources of the Wiki articles are also obviously hurting. The authors with original content are not getting the credit they deserve with major search engines anymore. Granted they are still getting the traffic from Wiki, but a better page rank would be a nice bonus.
Alternatives to nofollow
There are quite a few features Wikipedia could introduce to fix the spam issues.
1.) If it survives x amount of editors, then the nofollow attribute is removed.
2.) If it lasts x amount of days, then the nofollow attributed is removed.
3.) Akismet like system. I’ll go on an assumption that most of the links and text they’re adding is the same. So why can’t they start filtering links that contain a certain string of suspicious characters?
4.) Captchas.
5.) Trusted sites list. Perhaps links submitted could go in to a queue and wait to be approved as a legitimate and trusted source for Wikipedia.
6.) Not allow new users to add links. Ban old users that add spam links.
7.) Karma system. Let all people registered or not rate links as good or as spam. After enough spam submissions, the link is removed or put in to a queue for review.
8.) Require an email to register for Wikipedia. Any old bot can simply make thousands of accounts currently.
9.) Create an algorithm to check if the Wikipedia article edited has anything to do with the link places on the page. Most spam I get in my comments is for medication, and porn. Most of the time it has absolutely nothing to do with the articles they comment on.
10.) Blacklist certain domains that offer free blogging services. Myspace, *.blogger, and other free services are huge sources of spam. They are easy to create, and very disposable.
See also...
