Because of Wikipedias adoption of the rel=”nofollow” attribute there is a campaign on the growing with the goal of reducing the PageRank of Wikipedia, by adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links into Wikipedia. At this very moment there are people writing plugins for Wordpress and other popular content management systems to do this automatically. On my 200 or so web site I must have more than a thousand links to Wikipedia, but I am not a big fan of using the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

The very idea of the rel=”nofollow” was terrible. The search engines and mainly Google created a huge blog spam problem by basing their ranking algorithm on links. They could have done something differently, but they choose to create the link spam problem. I don’t blame the spammers, they are just doing what they need to do to support their families, I am blaming search engine engineers. Matt Cutts is the public face of Google, so I am blaming him. How can they sleep at night. The search engines introduced the rel=”nofollow” to fix a problem that had created, but was it successful? No, there are just as much or possibly more blog spam now than before the rel=”nofollow”, according to Matthew Mullenweg 96% of all attempted blog comments are spam! Blog spam is still worthwhile since it doesn’t cost much money to write spam scripts and have them run while the spammer is sleeping. The search engines are known to not totally ignore nofollow links and from a traffic view point the links are just as important as they have ever been. So will the rel=”nofollow” reduce Wikipedia spam, probably not of just the same reasons. In addition the Wikipedia is mirrored in whole or in parts on hundreds (or thousands?) of websites. If for anything the spammers will increase their efforts, so their kids won’t have to go hungrey with no shoes.

So why have I been linking to Wikipedia and spending hundreds of hours contributing content, maybe because I felt I was part of something new and important. By participating you get a feeling of pride and ownership, and most important you can feel great when you effectively togheter with people you are never even going to meet in real life manage to keep articles spam free. The main English Wikipedia has a strong community that are most of the time able to police articles. That is the reason for me linking to Wikipedia. There are other great sources that has suffered in the search engine rankings because of the love towards Wikipedia, among them is high quality sources like Encyclopædia Britannica. Wikipedia has more articles, but wouldn’t it be fair to say that a professional encyclopedia is a better source to link to. Full access is only 80$/year, but I guess quality is worth paying for.

I remember how it was before Wikipedia, webmasters used to link to the Open Directory (DMOZ) when they felt they needed to add a generic link. With Wikipedia it changed, there is no reason it can’t change yet again. I strongly dislike the rel=”nofollow” attribute, it is like a medicine that doesn’t cure, but poisons the patient. So I will not add the darn link condom to my links to the Wikipedia, however I will from now on only link to Wikipedia when it truly is the best resource available. Most of the time it is not.