Wikipedia’s role on the web has been worrying me lately. Not that Wikipedia in itself is in any way particularly bad, but its influence on the web as a whole has some problems.
In the olden days, finding information on the web was hard, and good link directories were worth their bytes in gold, and good content was worth even more. Nowadays we have good search engines, thanks to Google, and lots of good content (and lots of bad content too, but that’s not really a problem).
Wikipedia is one source of good content on the web. But it’s not the only one – it’s just the most obvious one in many cases. My problem with Wikipedia is mainly how people link to it. Here’s an example:
× I like to feed the pigeons. I sometimes feed the sparrows too.
This I’d like to claim is by far the most common way of referring to Wikipedia. What’s wrong with it?
- If your reader doesn’t know what a pigeon or sparrow is, it’s 99.9% certain that’s because the reader isn’t very good at English. In this case, if anything, every word ought to be linked to a dictionary, but that wouldn’t be very useful except for 0.1% of your readers. They should know how to look up words themselves if they’re not proficient in the language of the text they’re reading, don’t you think?
- If your reader suddenly becomes very interested in pigeons or sparrows by reading your text, I’m sure one of the first places your reader would look for informations on said birds is Wikipedia. There is no need to point people to Wikipedia, because everyone knows how to find Wikipedia articles anyway. In Firefox, just type “wikipedia pigeon” in the address bar, and you’ll get redirected to the page. In other browsers, go to google.com and type it in and press “I’m feeling lucky”. It’s real easy.
The reader might think that you’re linking to some really interesting tidbit about pigeons or sparrows, or maybe a funny Youtube video. But to find out, the reader has to mouse over the links and check the status bar where they point. Only to find out they just point to the Wikipedia entries, which the reader could easily have found without your assistance. This makes reading cumbersome.
- It degrades the quality of interlinking on the web. All you’re doing is helping Wikipedia get a higher PageRank – and their PageRank is already as high as it can get. You’re not helping the guy who has spent serious time documenting pigeons and sparrows and runs a really interesting web site on the subject that your readers may actually enjoy if you had only taken the time to find and link to it – like in the old days.
In the example above, it’d be easy to argue that “pigeons” and “sparrows” don’t need to be linked at all. But this is how thoughtlessly people use hyperlinks. So let’s change the example to something similar yet where hyperlinking a word might be more appropriate:
× But the pronunciation doesn’t change since the word is a dvandva.
I bet you don’t know what a dvandva is. It doesn’t matter here anyway since I’m just using it as an example but I’m sure you’ve already went and read the Wikipedia article. 
The Wikipedia entry comes out first on Google for a search on “dvandva”. Why? Probably because of hyperlinks like the above example. But the article sucks. Here’s an example of good use of hyperlinking:
○ But the pronunciation doesn’t change since the word is a dvandva.
The target of this link is a paper written at a university regarding dvandvas in Japanese. Of course, if the context isn’t about Japanese then it might not be the best link target, but I’m sure there are more good articles about dvandvas. I thought that paper was da proverbial bomb. Really good reading. That’s why I link to it – to encourage my readers to read it, and to promote it in the search rankings. (Of course this is hypothetical since I’m actually writing about something else right now but if I were writing about dvandvas…)
It takes time to find good link targets – but please take the time! For your own, your readers’, and the authors’ of those link targets sake. And for the future of the Internet.
Note that I am not opposed to linking to Wikipedia completely. If the Wikipedia article on a subject really is the best piece of information on it on the whole web, and the subject demands a hyperlink in order to be understood by most people, then indeed it’s the corresponding Wikipedia article you should link to.
Also of course when discussing Wikipedia itself it is highly appropriate to link to Wikipedia sources. But even in this case, I see it go wrong, for instance like this:
× Wikipedia recently started adding the “” attribute to outgoing links.
That “nofollow” link to the Wikipedia article on the “nofollow” attribute violates the point outlined above in the same way “pigeons” did. Here’s a better way of linking it:
○ Wikipedia recently started adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links.
which links to Wikipedia’s meta wiki describing the policy. That’s a good way of linking to Wikipedia. Here’s an even better way of doing it:
☆ Wikipedia recently started adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links.
That links to the most interesting text on the subject that I could find in a couple of minutes. I’ll gladly share that good piece of writing on this subject with you – that’s why I link to it.
Lastly, I’d like to mention that I think said Wikipedia policy of adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links on Wikipedia is stupid and bad. I think that if you read my above argumentation, you’ll see why I think that. People are linking to Wikipedia en masse for no good reason, bloating its PageRank and diminishing the chance of other, better, sources of information to get found. If at least being cited in a Wikipedia entry boosted the PageRank of the source, then the chance of someone finding it would improve just a little. Not to mention it would be fair. The paper on dvandva above and Ed Felten’s blog entry deserve that.
[No interwebs were hurt in the writing of this blog post; all links to Wikipedia have the "nofollow" attribute set.]
