To aggregate some of the arguments and counter-arguments, I posted https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/The_dofollow_FAQ and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Costs_and_benefits_of_using_nofollow. It does seem, from my googling of what the owners of smaller wikis have to say about it, that nofollow is less popular outside of WMF with many of those wiki owners who have taken the time to analyze the issue. On the other hand, it could be that people who were happy with the default felt less dissatisfied with MediaWiki devs' decision and therefore didn't feel as much need to voice their opinions, since they had already gotten their way and didn't have to take any measures to override the default.
I do think the implications of changing how nofollow is applied are very different on, say, Wikipedia than they would be on a small or even medium-sized wiki where the average user watches RecentChanges instead of a watchlist. In a small town, you can leave your doors unlocked and get away with it because you don't have as much traffic coming through and the neighbors would notice and care about (for curiosity, if no other reason) the presence of anyone who seemed out of place. It's the same way on these small wikis; it's rare than anyone comes along to try to subtly add a spam link, and when they do, it's noticed. Likewise, if someone starts marking spammy edits as patrolled, that gets noticed. Spambots are not able yet to be subtle, and the labor required to get accustomed to the norms of a wiki and to become fluent enough in the native language to fit in require a skilled labor that is more expensive than that required to simply pass a CAPTCHA. So, I think that putting dofollow on patrolled external links would be okay especially on smaller wikis, as the patrol would stop the spambots from getting a pagerank boost and the labor costs would deter the subtler ones. Even on Wikipedia, those fighting spam can take advantage of the same economies of scale as those adding spam, such as using pattern recognition on the entire wiki to catch people, or blacklisting individual spammers and taking measures to keep them out (on the smaller wikis, a person caught spamming can just go to another wiki, but if you're caught spamming on Wikipedia, there isn't another site of Wikipedia's size and scope you can go to.) To say that patrolling wouldn't do enough to keep spam out is basically to say, at least to some extent, that patrolling is not a very effective system and that the wiki way doesn't work very well. If Google agrees, they can stop giving wikis in general, or certain wikis, such influence over pagerank. The spammers have market incentives to become more sophisticated, but so does Google, since their earnings depend on keeping their search results relevant and useful, so that people don't switch to competitors that do a better job. The question of what the default configuration should be, or what configuration should be used on WMF sites, can be addressed in other bugs besides this one. It doesn't take much coding to change a default setting from "true" to "false". For now, I would just like to implement the feature and make it available for those wikis who want to use it. So, is there support for putting this in the core as an optional feature, and is there anyone who will do the code review if I write this? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
