W-Shadow.com

I just found out about the Wikipedia “scandal” recently (by reading a webcomic), and somehow my thoughts turned immediately to how this could be exploited.

Monetary rewards are unlikely, but one could get a good bit of publicity/backlinks… if they found a way to attract the attention of the same people who voted the aforementioned “scandal” to the frontpage of Digg. Here are some ideas on how to do just that.

Add nofollow to any links to Wikipedia

Wikipedia adds nofollow to all outgoing links, so why not retaliate by doing the same? The rel=”nofollow” tag indicates that the link should not pass any “link juice” and should be ignored by search engines (most notably Google). Obviously this would have no visible effect on the incredible Google rankings Wikipedia already has, but hey, it’s a philosophical statement (or something)!

Unfortunately there’s already a Wikipedia nofollow WordPress plugin that does just this, so you might not get much publicity if you create another one.

Make a Firefox plugin

Lots of possibilities here. Just a few ideas off the top of my head :

• A plugin that displays a “For Entertainment Purposes Only” disclaimer on every Wikipedia page. Or maybe something like this :
  
• Actually add the disclaimer to every page – program the plugin to automatically edit every page you visit. For hardcore Wiki-haters only! (Bonus points for “hardcore” and being somewhat illegal?)
• Make a plugin that removes Wikipedia links from the search results on Google. Claim every student should use it to ensure that when they do research, they get accurate and unbiased results.

Filter Wikipedia referers

See where the visitor came from, and if it’s Wikipedia, redirect them to some page critical of Wikipedia (Wikipedia Watch and Wikipedia Review are prime candidates).

Okay, so this probably wouldn’t make much of a difference in the real world – most sites don’t get any traffic from Wikipedia. But it’s the thought that counts, right? All I can say is this approach worked out really well (or really bad, depends on how you look at it) for WhyDiggIsBlocked.com (at least it got to the first page of Digg!).

This idea can be further extended to use the browser history CSS hack to determine if the user has visited Wikipedia sometime in the past and react accordingly.

Disclaimers & Conclusions

I don’t hate Wikipedia. Everything discussed above is purely for entertainment purposes, et cetera. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone actually did something like this (after all, it is great linkbait material) 🙂