On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 1:59 AM, Nathan Larson <nathanlarson3...@gmail.com>wrote:
> You're right; if more wikis were to switch off nofollow, it almost > certainly would encourage spammers to target MediaWiki more. That in turn > would likely tend to prompt affected site owners to install more/better > antispam tools, and would stimulate demand for development of such tools. > Of course, there are costs associated with allocating labor to those > activities; I'm just saying the problems can be mitigated from what they > would be if the community could not adapt. Admittedly, there might be some > attrition because some site owners will simply give up. In economics > parlance, it's a question of how > inelastic<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand>the > demand for the benefits of wiki site ownership is; if it's pretty > inelastic, then site owners won't be deterred by the spammers. > Speaking as the former Admin Tools lead, I'm (currently) seeing lots of spam issues piling up, but even serious issues fail to be addressed because there are bigger issues that have to be prioritized. I'm not optimistic that new tools will be developed an installed by site administrators. Developer time is, sadly, more expensive than lots of volunteers doing manual work. > Shutting off nofollow could encourage more editing in general, not just > spambot editing. Sometimes there's a grey area of semi-spam, in which > people make edits that are somewhat useful to the project's goals and also > somewhat promotional. Arguably, much of Wikipedia's content was contributed > by people pursuing some sort of personal agenda that happened to be enough > aligned with Wikipedia's goals that the two were able to coexist. > Sometimes, people who wanted to engage in promotional editing probably got > involved in other parts of the community, and edited unrelated articles, in > order to make their agendas less obvious. > I think a few people would definitely argue this point, but I do see your point. Maybe someone on the growth team could comment on editor motivations, and being motivated by giving (SEO relevant) links to other sites? If there's a whole lot of editors who would suddenly spend more time editing if they knew it affected SEO, then there might be a case for turning this on (even on WMF wikis). But there are other people on this list far more qualified to make those calls. _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
