On 25/05/2011 15:23, Ian Woollard wrote: > On 25/05/2011, Andreas Kolbe<[email protected]> wrote: >> Okay, now we are getting somewhere. >> These templates are all new creations by Cirt, the Santorum article's main >> author. They were created between 10 and 15 May, shortly after Santorum >> announced he might run for President, and then added to all the other >> articles listed in the templates, thus creating a couple of hundred incoming >> links, and enhancing the article's Google ranking. >> >> Now, *that's using Wikipedia for political campaigning.* > To be fair, we don't actually know it's having any effect at all, and > it could be *lowering* the ranking for the article by sending its > juice off to other articles around, averaging and diluting it down. > > My point was only that we probably shouldn't be doing anything, even > accidentally, that would be likely to change its link juice over what > it naturally gets. If it's fairly naturally at the top of the google > listings, and we haven't done anything odd, then that's perfectly > fine.
As I said earlier in the thread, COI is possibly relevant here. Also the issue of whether a template should contain a certain linked entry, or not, is a legitimate discussion. "Slang" doesn't usually mean "words somebody thinks ought to be slang", but actual street language. The alleged SEO is, I still think, primarily the problem of those running search engines. I can see that its discussion is a bit more complex than that if you include: giving a stick to those who want one to beat WP with; and alerting Google (and others) to the way our link "agriculture" might have artificial elements. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
