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
Cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro
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