Why Wikipedia should remove themselves from Search Engines
This is an extension to my latest comment on this blog entry.
If you search for just about any term in google, you will find that if a wikipedia entry exists it will be ranked among the top few entries.
This exposes a flaw in the concept of Google search algorithms, as despite the quality of the content of the page, simply because it exists on wikipedia and is well linked within the framework of the site, it gets shuffled to the top of the google search page results.
Creating a page which is within the first page of the biggest search engine freely editable by anyone with any agenda is just asking for abuse.
Del.icio.us has been pretty free of spam and spammy links. The reason for this is their very logical decision not to allow search engines to index the pages by adding the following metatag.
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>
If wikipedia would do this it would solve a LOT of problems. The fact that wikipedia ranks so well not only means that objectionable content often floats to the top of the search engine rankings, but you also get a lot more random people who surf in through google (most likely looking for information) and end up editing the article and bringing the quality down.
So this is a callout to wikipedia, please get your pages out of google and work towards refining your content rather than being a nesting ground for link spammers, people with personal agendas and random vandals.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
Was that a hidden marketing tip??
October 19th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Just try, they will smack your spam down so fast it will make your head swim
October 23rd, 2006 at 2:12 pm
On the contrary, the aim for Wikipedia is to lead more and more people to contribute and to improve weak articles. And fact is Wikipedia articles *are* improving, so claiming “(…) you also get a lot more random people who surf in through google (…)and end up editing the article and bringing the quality down” is simply not true. It’s the opposite.
October 23rd, 2006 at 2:23 pm
I would have to argue that the more accurate an article becomes, the more chance that a random submitter will make it incorrect rather than correct.
If I start a stub then anything anyone says will benefit the article, however if the article has been around for years, and some random person (not a wikipedian) comes to add “facts” then I would venture to say that they will hurt the project more than they benefit it.
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:54 pm
At Wikipedia, we are not thinking the same. Return to basics : The purpose of the project is to build collectively a encyclopedia, by letting *everybody* contribute. So manage in order Google or others to stop to reference Wikipeda would be a non-sense.
October 23rd, 2006 at 10:21 pm
You would think that facts are facts which don’t change. If everyone was correct but with a different point of view then why does so much work go into wikipedians beating back spam, or vandals?
I hope you aren’t editing the english wikipedia… THAT would be “non-sense”
October 24th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Ha! — Yeh I agree with you on that Wormus. Maybe the pages which are locked out and pretty much “up to date” can be crawled but then again where does it end.
I think the solution though is for Google to not treat wikis with so highly and to in general trim down the importance of internal linking.
Content is supposed to be king, but at present quality “keyword rich” internal links are king.
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