Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:14 UTC
De.wp currently has rel="nofollow" in every weblink on to other site. It is save to assume that there are enough eyeballs to watch for hyperlinks to assure that all weblinks are relevant to a given article. En.wp has nofollow disabled as well.
It's not safe to assume this, as proved on en.wikipedia.org. After further discussion it will be restored to full use there as well.
According to http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseExternalLinks.htm, de.wp has about 500.000 weblinks. These weblinks have to follow the rules which are displayed at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Weblinks and are the finest the web has to offer about a given topic. The Nofollow tag may be useful to wikis with less attention, with less content or without the expressed will to provide useful hyperlinks. A verbose discussion might be helpful to determine whether the usage of nofollow in this way is even intentional according to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html This whole feature does not directly apply to humans but any machine that has a PageRank-like style in finding relevant pages.
