How Jimbo gamed Wikibooks, in 2006 Options

[jayvdb]

... the fact that the WMF has so readily tolerated the follow/no follow advantage to Wikia ...

Advantage to Wikia over who?

Wikia is only one of many wikis who all share that advantage, along with other websites which are not wikis.

There is no reason the interwiki prefixes should have any effect on the nofollow attribute. Rather, these should exist solely for ease of linking to web-sites whose urls follow a predictable pattern, and without implying merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

I vaguely recall the reason given was that the predominance of wikis on the interwiki map meant that using this to control nofollow promoted other wikis, which is within of the mission of the WMF. I don't know if that was ever sensible, but with sites like wikifur on it, I would prefer that this was discontinued, or a separate table was used for nofollow. It strikes me as odd that WikiFur is on it, but Wikipedia Review is not.

[jayvdb]

... the fact that the WMF has so readily tolerated the follow/no follow advantage to Wikia ...

Advantage to Wikia over who?

Wikia is only one of many wikis who all share that advantage, along with other websites which are not wikis.

Also, the 'interwiki map' is managed in part by the community on the talk page on meta, but the changes made to the database are performed by devs, and these devs would say they were also acting as part of the community rather than agents of the WMF.

The 'advantage' is mediated by commercial exploitability, so all those non commercial wikis are irrelevant, (unless it could be shown they are an effective non monetised market offering competition to Wikia). The point is that Wikia appears to be the only commercial operation enjoying 'follow' ...

There many are for-profit websites on the interwiki map (wikiinvest, acronymfinder, theacquariumwiki, allwiki, biblewiki, etc which sport ads), and other possibly commercial operations like wikihow (do those guys have a business plan?). (this list doesn't appear to be well maintained as wikiindex.com is now dead) I'd like to see a clear example of how the interwiki map has been advantageous to Wikia over their competitors.

The rules for inclusion are provided on the talk page; they are:
1. provide clear and relevant use to the Wikimedia projects
2. be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to the Wikimedia projects
3. be free content (under a Commons-acceptable license)
4. be a wiki
5. have reasonable amounts of content
6. does not contain malware

I suspect that many Wikia subdomains don't meet that criteria, and that there are wikis on other wiki farms which do. Only a single wikispaces sub-domain is on the list. What would be interesting is if wikis on other farms were declined; the discussion archives would be worth reading.

It looks like all Wikia subdomains are given link juice. In order to satisfy rules 1 and 5, each wikia subdomain should be evaluated separately. This could be an advantage for new Wikia sites, however this would be less relevant if rules 1 & 5 have not been used to reject Wikia competitors.

[Kelly Martin]

these devs would say they were also acting as part of the community rather than agents of the WMF.

Saying that you're not acting as an agent of your employer does absolutely nothing to dispel the conclusion that you are acting as the agent of your employer; if anything, it cements that conclusion.

Wikipedians seem to have very strange ideas about agency law.

[thekohser]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the "bug" that interwiki links were exempt from "nofollow" was finally corrected, about 9 to 12 months after it was noticed by people like me. I believe they kept "dofollow" status on interwiki links between WMF projects, but I could be wrong about that.

I would say that this item:

2. be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to the Wikimedia projects

...is perhaps the most interesting. How many times has Jimmy Wales stood before a Wikimania audience with a PowerPoint deck that has the "Wikia" logo in the lower corner? Or, indeed, with Wales wearing his famous brown and yellow "Wikia" t-shirt? I know that's not to say it's "encouraging spam links", but it certainly goes a long way toward promoting Wikia and probably communicating at least a tolerance for spam links.

I have been trying to complete a small "study" of Wikia-bound external links from Wikipedia. It's a bit time consuming to check 100 random links and investigate the sorts of meta-data that surround them. I didn't get a bunch of volunteers who wanted to help me with that. I'll put it out there again -- anyone want to help me finish this study? (I have completed documenting only the first 11 out of the 100 target links. Volunteers could simply pitch in on whatever aspects they wanted. If you just want to identify the target links, but not investigate the Wikia destinations, that would be fine, for example.)

[Jon Awbrey]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the "bug" that interwiki links were exempt from "nofollow" was finally corrected, about 9 to 12 months after it was noticed by people like me. I believe they kept "dofollow" status on interwiki links between WMF projects, but I could be wrong about that.

I would say that this item:

2. be trusted not to encourage spam links being added to the Wikimedia projects

… is perhaps the most interesting. How many times has Jimmy Wales stood before a Wikimania audience with a PowerPoint deck that has the "Wikia" logo in the lower corner? Or, indeed, with Wales wearing his famous brown and yellow "Wikia" t-shirt? I know that's not to say it's "encouraging spam links", but it certainly goes a long way toward promoting Wikia and probably communicating at least a tolerance for spam links.

I have been trying to complete a small "study" of Wikia-bound external links from Wikipedia. It's a bit time consuming to check 100 random links and investigate the sorts of meta-data that surround them. I didn't get a bunch of volunteers who wanted to help me with that. I'll put it out there again — anyone want to help me finish this study? (I have completed documenting only the first 11 out of the 100 target links. Volunteers could simply pitch in on whatever aspects they wanted. If you just want to identify the target links, but not investigate the Wikia destinations, that would be fine, for example.)

I don't understand why it's so hard for people to see the pattern. Are they just not paying attention?

Maybe there's some sort of subtlety I don't see, but it seems like all you'd have to do is follow some Meta-Blacklister like Mike.Lifeguard or In-Url Retentive Twinkle Twit like MrOllie through a week's activity and see if they ever blacklist a single Wikia site or delete a single link to Wikia.

Maybe it's just that same old dodge again — the way that the Wiki-Parochial Political System fundamentally depends on the existence of real vandals and real spam to provide them with convenient cover for their real abuses.

Jon Awbrey

[thekohser]

Maybe an interesting test would be for everyone here to remove exactly 3 external links from Wikipedia to any of the "less formidable" Wikia sub-sites, then report back collectively on what happened in response to those edits, maybe over a 7-day period.

[thekohser]

I have been trying to complete a small "study" of Wikia-bound external links from Wikipedia.

One Wikia wiki that came up in the sample just now was this one, about the TV show 'Charmed'. Interesting header on the wiki's main page:

The Wikia Staff has been notified about this wiki's current situation. What has happened here has gotten way out of hand. We're not pointing fingers at anyone, this is all our fault, even ours. We're hoping that this wikia can have a fresh start. This Wiki will start a shut down, Until further notice, we ask you to not make any major edits. Thanks, the Admins.

Is everything a chaotic mess that Jimbo touches?

[Jon Awbrey]

I have been trying to complete a small "study" of Wikia-bound external links from Wikipedia.

One Wikia wiki that came up in the sample just now was this one, about the TV show 'Charmed'. Interesting header on the wiki's main page:

The Wikia Staff has been notified about this wiki's current situation. What has happened here has gotten way out of hand. We're not pointing fingers at anyone, this is all our fault, even ours. We're hoping that this wikia can have a fresh start. This Wiki will start a shut down, Until further notice, we ask you to not make any major edits. Thanks, the Admins.

Is everything a chaotic mess that Jimbo touches?

J N

[Somey]

One Wikia wiki that came up in the sample just now was this one, about the TV show 'Charmed'. Interesting header on the wiki's main page:

The Wikia Staff has been notified about this wiki's current situation. What has happened here has gotten way out of hand. We're not pointing fingers at anyone, this is all our fault, even ours. We're hoping that this wikia can have a fresh start. This Wiki will start a shut down, Until further notice, we ask you to not make any major edits. Thanks, the Admins.

Apparently what happened there is that because the show was cancelled several years ago, participation dropped to just a handful of people (with only one or two active admins), all trying to deal with several thousand articles. One of them, User:TheBook, had some sort of meltdown recently, probably for the usual reasons (i.e., not being sufficiently deferred to, others attempting to change destroy his/her work, general-purpose emotional instability, etc.). It's a good example of the fan-wiki life cycle, at least once the object of fandom has been discontinued, cancelled, killed in a boating accident, or whatever. Because of the limited appeal and context of such sites, you don't have to wait for "community fragmentation" for this to occur as you would on larger wikis.

Is everything a chaotic mess that Jimbo touches?

Yes. However, it should be noted that it's possible to have a chaotic mess even without Jimbo's involvement, as might be evidenced by my hair today.

[Abd]

these devs would say they were also acting as part of the community rather than agents of the WMF.

Saying that you're not acting as an agent of your employer does absolutely nothing to dispel the conclusion that you are acting as the agent of your employer; if anything, it cements that conclusion.

Wikipedians seem to have very strange ideas about agency law.

So are some critics. Are the "devs" employees? What we have here is one tenuous legal theory on top of another tenuous legal theory, pursuing what?

[I-20]

well, I can only sum this up in a few words:

Wikibooks has lost. Wikia won.

So much for free and so forth... the real winner is Wikibooks.

@thekohser Should I do the reserve on Wikia?

[thekohser]

well, I can only sum this up in a few words:

Wikibooks has lost. Wikia won.

So much for free and so forth... the real winner is Wikibooks.

@thekohser Should I do the reserve on Wikia?

I don't understand this post.