26January
The theory was so simple: a website that anyone could edit, and that aimed to capture everything that everyone knows. The practice is less simple, the project has been taken over by a self-elected cabal of geeks, and reflexively prizes geek culture over high culture and low culture; and values repeated claim over actual truth.
Last week-end, the owner of the English Wikipedia project took a unilateral decision to turn on a nofollow attribute in all off-site links. We wrote about nofollow when it was introduced, a little over two years ago, and said at the time how it was a completely misguided solution. If the problem is useless results in search engines, then it is up to the search engines to improve themselves, not force the rest of the world to change so that they get an easy life. In the hundred weeks of operation, nofollow has done nothing to remove the nonsense in search engine results, and plenty to diminish the quality of those results.
Indeed, this is a clear abuse of the original nofollow proposal. That was to use the attribute exclusively on comments in blogs, and other areas that were beyond the direct control of the site author. As Michael Gray recounts, G****e fucked about with nofollow for its own advantage after declaring the standard, but (though reprehnsible) that is not particularly relevant to our discussion here. Wikipedia is quite clearly in direct control of its own site... isn't it?
Therein lies the real problem. Given that it claims to be a website that anyone can edit, one would expect Wikipedia to remove any attempts to introduce fluff links very quickly. If it's easy to add something in, then it's at least as easy to take it out again. Indeed, that process seemed to be working quite well. Until last Saturday, when the attribute was turned on without consultation, without warning, and with only the most specious of rationales.
We've always advocated great caution, treating Wikipedia as a broad-brush overview, prone to simplification and misinterpretation, and to check anything with a proper source. Now, it appears that James Wales, Wikipedia's own founder, is saying that he doesn't trust its content. If he doesn't, why should we?
Some have interpreted Wikipedia's little confession as a recognition that it prizes the interests of one unmentionably-evil search engine above the interests of all its potential users. We prefer to interpret this as a confession that Wikipedia is fundamentally, and possibly irreversibly, broken. We'll seek better and more reliable sources for our features, like Mrs Goggins on the number 25 bus, the front page of the Daily Hell, or M Khan (still bent).
