SEOs push Wikipedia to add NoFollow to links

Wikipedia, in its earlier days, had tagged the links as NoFollow which was subsequently removed in November 95.  Now during the recent SEO contest, SEOs have pushed Wikipedia again to tag the links as NoFollow. 

What this means is that all the external links on Wikipedia will be rendered as invisible to Search Engines.  This has been done to check spammers who are using Wiki for their blackhat SEO practices.

There is a lot of debate happening in the blogosphere that whether this is a right move by Jimbo Wales or not.  All said and done, this move will thwart spammers but will also affect whitehat SEOs and genuine content providers. 

With Google depending largely on Wiki links to decide on page rank, is this going to affect google rankings is a big question.  This will also affect those Wiki articles whose details content is accessible through a link.  The writers will not get the benefit of these links even if the link genuinely points to the relevant content.

Thanks to spammers, all SEO practitioners have to change their SEO strategy in case Wiki does not change this decision.  As of now it seems that Wiki will have all the benefit for incoming links but nobody will have the benefit of links from Wiki, not even the original sources linked to Wiki.

In my opinion, Wiki has a wrong solution for a right problem.  This move is not going to solve the spamming issue with Wiki.