wiki and nofollow links

[Nicu Buculei]

Since we switched from Moin to MediaWiki, all the outgoing links from 
the wiki have the attribute rel="nofollow", which instructs the search 
engines to ignore the PageRank value and do not influence the link 
target's ranking.

This attribute was introduced in MediaWiki as a countermeasure against 
spammers which tried to abuse Wikipedia, linking to their own malicious 
websites. While there is some merit of using this at Wikipedia, where 
even unauthenticated users are allowed to post, other people do not 
think this is fair and consider Wikipedia acts like a black hole of the 
web, absorbing PageRank without giving anything back, after it used all 
the PageRank received to build its reputation (this is also my opinion 
and when I link to Wikipedia in my websites I always use rel="nofollow").

The situation in our wiki is very different: we allow posting only from 
authenticated users which have a FAS account, so the editors have to 
pass a number of filters and leave enough identification data.

Personally, I hate to be treated as a spammer (such treatment is a 
result of using rel="nofollow" by default). *If* I am found abusing the 
system for personal gain, then kick me out and remove all my rights, 
otherwise I believe I deserve to be considered an innocent user.

I also think there are legit uses for "dofollow" links in our wiki: we 
want to give PageRank value to friendly or sister projects, like pages 
from fedorahosted.org, fedorapeople.org or entities like GNOME, Red Hat 
or CentOS.

So, based on the argumentation above, my proposal is to trust the users 
and remove the "nofollow" attribute.

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com
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