Point well taken. I think what many SEOs gripe about is Wiki’s lack of 2-way link love. While contributing content is one aspect of participating in a community, we also hope to be rewarded with additional link juice for our time and efforts.

I wonder if a link spam tool could’ve taken care of the link spam, without completely neutering Wiki’s ability to share link juice.

Lorna

Just to clarify something: using the no-follow plugin does not give you higher link-juice; it just treats Wikipedia the way Wikipedia treats us. We can only hope that enough people do this to affect their SERPs and, in the end, get them to undo their no-follow for all outbound links.

The essential point SEOs miss is that helping SEOs has nothing to do with what Wikipedia does or why it does it; they’re not our constituency at all. Wikipedia is written by its editors for its editors and readers, to make something that’s useful to readers and that creates content that can be reused by others; SEOs are a third party demanding Wikipedia help them get in good with a fourth party, Google. SEOs will be helped by Wikipedia precisely as far as that contributes to the mission of writing a free content encyclopedia.

It is also useful to note that Wikipedia doesn’t lift a finger to raise its popularity or search ratings - its popularity is entirely from word of mouth. And its massive popularity is, in practice, a massive pain in the backside - it costs a fortune to serve a top 10 site without ads, and being at the top of every Google search means a lot of stuff (biographies of living people in particular) need harsh constraints on their content because they have to be not-awful right now, meaning we don’t have time to take our time and get things just right. It’s all a tricky one.