Wikipedia has always been a gold mine for web developers. Wikipedia serves up massive traffic, and articles usually have a high Google PageRank. So getting linked from a Wikipedia article has been one of the best ways to beef up your site.

However, Wikipedia will no longer be a very effective tool. As of now, all outbound links from the english Wikipedia Site use the NOFOLLOW html attribute, no exceptions. This means that wherever you place a link, the article body, references, external links, talk page, it will be ignored by search engines. No major search engines will give a site credit for being linked to from Wikipedia.

The reason for this change is to hopefully cut back on spam. Wikipedia is one of the largest targets for spammers, and dealing with it has been a major hurdle for editors. Making links NOFOLLOW will not eliminate SPAM at Wikipedia, but it will surely reduce it.

I understand the mind set for doing this, but I think it is a wrong move. Wikipedia is the largest collection of information and knoweledge ever made. Most of the information is scraped from other websites, so it’s only fair that credit is given where due.

For example, I have contributed a lot to the Wiki pages about FLCL. Most of the information is from my personal research on my FLCL website. Now, search engines will interpret everything I have contributed as an original work of Wikipedia; my website gets no se-cred as being the source.

However, Wikipedia can still be a secondary tool for webmasters. I still get a fair amount of direct traffic from links in the articles.