google should penalize wikipedia

I am concerned that Wikipedia is becoming Napster of intellectual property. No secret, its writers often take their information from other web sites, which often takes years and a lot of money to build. They then copy or slightly re-phrase the information and post it online, essentially denying the original sites traffic/ad revenue. I do not even mention accuracy of such "research," Stephen Colbert described that well.

It might be a matter of time, when a number of serious publishers bring a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against them, which could bankrupt them.

 

[[George W. Bush]] has 33,566 revisions. Good luck figureing out who should be credited for what.

Wikipedia is a gift economy. Not a way for sites to get traffic.

Because that is how charity works.

Not really because it means the reader may well end up with less than ideal links.

 

Given the shoot on sight approach to copyvios that seems unlikely.

You can't copyright information only the way is presented.

If you find copyvios please report them to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems

So they can be removed.

No DMCA safe harbour. Wikipedia does far more than is required (it actively hunts down copyvios).

 

Don't get me wrong, IMHO. However, every time something which is usually expensive and time-consuming is suddenly becoming easy and free, I see two possibilities: either some kind of breakthrough was achieved or a crime was committed.

When a crook on the street offers you a Rolex watch for $30, you know that it is either stolen or a cheap replica. This is an analogy for quality and the origin of some Wikipedia material -- it might be copied, it might be sloppy research, or a biased propaganda from some corporation or a politician. That said, I do believe most Wikipedia contributors are honest and well intentioned.

 

The GNU Compiler Collection wiped out an entire industry. Nothing was stolen though.

 

Wikipedia is supposed to cite its references, but all too often there are articles that don't do this. So you can have ordinary webmasters working very hard to compile original articles, and when someone puts the same information up without attribution, the content creator loses out.

 

The way I see it is that Wikipedia is a cheap and fast way to ride on a PageRank 7/8/9/10. It definitely opens for abuse. Where else you can find a "website" with high PageRank that people can freely tag their outbound link. I wouldn't allow it on my PR5 sites. Wikipedia must feel that way, eventually.

 

The same can be said about personal computers and typewriters and many other inventions. However all these were replaced with better devices, and I think jury is still out on quality and legality of Wikipedia's invention, as it is out on Google's idea to scan and publish books online. I see both good and bad in that, and if it becomes apparent that Wikipedia's business makes serious research and independent online journalism unprofitable, there might be legal challenges.

I also think Wikipedia's decision to use "no follow" links is arrogant to say the least. It is like telling legitimate web publishers: "We know we can use your information for free, but we want to make sure you do not get any PR boost from us in return, since you might be one of those "for profit" sites." By that Wikipedia essentially acknowledges that many of their links are to the sites, whose sole purpose is to make easy money. With "no follow" links, publishers of "fake" web sites have even more incentive to get their links on Wikipedia, because they can still make money from traffic. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

Journalism has other problems and it would take much more than Wikipedia to crack the journal publishing industry. I doubt even Bill Gates could do that. The federal government is having a go in a narrow area but even they are running into significant opposition.

No it is telling Google and the like that we see no reason why we should sweat away to help them give more relevant results (it also follows Google’s guidelines but that wasn't really something that was considered).

Wikipedia has no problem with that. Even the licence it is under allows commercial reuse.

Wikipedia also takes information from books, journals and newspapers. We couldn't give them page rank even if we wanted to.

It reduces the number of people trying to add vanity links and well every little helps.

 

Interdentally the above is one of the people you want to blame if you object to Wikipedia going no follow.

 

I don't think that using nofollow is against Google webmaster guidelines

 

The chances of that is very slim. The reasons for this is because as far as I know Google and the other major search egines came together and actually invented this No Follow link thing so that sites use it on things like blogs and things to help them prevent webmasters spamming their sites just for link benefits and PR gain. This in returns helps the search engines because it stops alot of webmasters spamming just to get better rankings.

 

i dont think that google or the other search engines wil ban the wikipedia . in my opinion , your idea is crap not real

 

You, Sir, are a genius. Green rep added for this pearl of wisdom.

 

OK, I understand. I just hope the feud between two companies does not evolve into a collective punishment for their users.

 

Technically, one can imagine a writer or a scientist counting his/her online citations, including those in Wikipedia, and using them to increase personal citation index.

 

Being a newbie and trying to follow all sides in this thread, I think this is an excellent point. It seems logical that much less quality content would be submitted if there was not the bonus of a link. Or is wiki already so huge that this will not really effect anything?

 

German wikipedia has had nofollow forever. It's pretty good. In some ways better than english.

 

No impact on users. Annoys a few people who are trying to exploit wikipedia but they are free to fork.

 

Well, we're removing our submissions.

Not all people who contributed to that dung-heap were looking to "exploit" Wikipedia, I have a nice PR already. We're all about helping those who need info.

However, if they're so pompous as to disallow a simple citation of source, screw them. I've just added a script to add nofollow to every Wikipedia link on my site as well.