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Oh, and more to the point: This is a role Wikipedia explicitly renounced, isn't it. When it became so big and the Google PageRank gave it high importance, the s

Oh, and more to the point: This is a role Wikipedia explicitly renounced, isn't it. When it became so big and the Google PageRank gave it high importance, the spam became unbearable so Wikipedia decided it needs to change the incentives and it applied the rel=nofollow to all external links, so that it could stop working as an unpaid manual spam filter for the whole internet. Sure, your new search might ignore the rel=nofollow but if you ever become big enough, the incentives of spammers would lead to a bigger spamming pressure on Wikipedia...

p-e-w 4y ago
That's easily fixed by relying only on protected or high-profile pages. Those already deal (mostly successfully) with spam and NPOV violations on a daily basis, so piggybacking on those protection mechanisms should yield a fairly high-quality pool of curated external links.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  While that sounds good in theory, who is to say those that can edit protected and high profile pages aren't in SEO spammers' pockets? I mean the edit history is public and there's plenty of people that actually pay attention to edits and the like so they would be found out soon enough, but still. I'm sure this is an ongoing discussion when e.g. political figures' pages are protected as well - who becomes the gatekeeper, and what is their political angle?
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    Sure, but at that point you're simply discussing Wikipedia's quality control system, which may be an interesting discussion, but has nothing to do with search engines per se. Considering that Wikipedia has become a pillar of most scientific work (imagine writing a math or computer science paper without Wikipedia – utterly unthinkable), it's safe to say that knowledgeable people have collectively decided that its quality control mechanisms are "good enough", or at least better than those of any other resource of comparable depth and breadth. And that puts Wikipedia's link pool leaps and bounds ahead of whatever dark magic current search engines are using, which mostly seems to be "funnel the entire web through some (easily gamed) heuristic".
    - nneonneo 4y ago
      Ehh, I think you’ve overestimated the quality of Wikipedia on highly specialist topics (like, say, the kinds of things you’d write academic papers on). It’s not so much that it doesn’t have the content, it’s that the coverage is super uneven; sometimes it has extremely detailed articles on a niche theorem in a particular field, and other times it has the barest stub of information on an entire sub-sub-field of study.

p-e-w 4y ago

That's easily fixed by relying only on protected or high-profile pages. Those already deal (mostly successfully) with spam and NPOV violations on a daily basis, so piggybacking on those protection mechanisms should yield a fairly high-quality pool of curated external links.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
While that sounds good in theory, who is to say those that can edit protected and high profile pages aren't in SEO spammers' pockets? I mean the edit history is public and there's plenty of people that actually pay attention to edits and the like so they would be found out soon enough, but still. I'm sure this is an ongoing discussion when e.g. political figures' pages are protected as well - who becomes the gatekeeper, and what is their political angle?
- p-e-w 4y ago
  Sure, but at that point you're simply discussing Wikipedia's quality control system, which may be an interesting discussion, but has nothing to do with search engines per se. Considering that Wikipedia has become a pillar of most scientific work (imagine writing a math or computer science paper without Wikipedia – utterly unthinkable), it's safe to say that knowledgeable people have collectively decided that its quality control mechanisms are "good enough", or at least better than those of any other resource of comparable depth and breadth. And that puts Wikipedia's link pool leaps and bounds ahead of whatever dark magic current search engines are using, which mostly seems to be "funnel the entire web through some (easily gamed) heuristic".
  - nneonneo 4y ago
    Ehh, I think you’ve overestimated the quality of Wikipedia on highly specialist topics (like, say, the kinds of things you’d write academic papers on). It’s not so much that it doesn’t have the content, it’s that the coverage is super uneven; sometimes it has extremely detailed articles on a niche theorem in a particular field, and other times it has the barest stub of information on an entire sub-sub-field of study.