Wikipedia Asks for Help!
After adding the “nofollow” tags last year to Wikipedia to discourage spammers and search engine marketers (SEM) to use Wikipedia as a way to gain inbound links, Search Engine Land reports that Wikipedia editor Jehochman, has now contacted several SEO experts to edit and maintain a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page on Wikipedia. It is nice to know that actual experts in the industry are maintaining this useful page, but it seems like a majority of the other pages on Wikipedia are maintained by people who think they know what they are talking about, but may have no actual experience. The page is currently a “featured article candidate,” which is the best of the best on Wikipedia.
The one issue than many SEO professionals are buzzing about now is the uphill battle it will be to maintain the page, because anyone can edit any page on Wikipedia once it is live. For the SEO page especially, there are probably a ton of link spammers and other SEO companies wanting a link to their Web site on this Wikipedia page. So, although there are industry experts maintaining this site, how is Wikipedia better than before the “nofollow”? The number of links added to Wikipedia is still increasing, because even if it doesn’t increase the number of inbound links, it still creates traffic, because Wikipedia usually ranks high in search engine results.
As my colleague Eric recently wrote about in Wikipedia Quality in Decline, Wikipedia is still a great place for research as a majority of the content is still relevant for everyday searching. I agree with Eric also when he says that he probably wouldn’t quote or source anything in Wikipedia for a term paper.
My thought is that if Jehochman doesn’t have enough knowledge to create a Wikipedia page about SEO on his own, and he is the official editor of the page, how many other Wikipedia editors are out there that don’t have enough knowledge about the topic they are in charge of editing?
