And like I say, it’s the commercial organisations using these practices which I find more concerning.

If everyone stops linking to Wikipedia, then what becomes the new de facto source of information? Google Docs?

Wikipedia has a high Pagerank right now, not for their own optimization but because everyone links to it.

I take your point that the situation is created by Google’s mysterious algorithm, but at the same time I don’t think anyone can ignore the fact that Google controls so much of the search traffic that it’s a key factor in the popularity of a site.

I’m a huge advocate for word of mouth and personal recommendations, hence why I value Twitter so much, for example. But Wikipedia has only instituted no follow links since they became available, as has the New York Times and Business Week.

That’s not Google mysteriously changing something - it’s taking a conscious decision to follow a policy after nofollow was introduced. And as I said above, I’m sympathetic to Wikipedia doing it as a reference source more than I am to commercial media doing it - Wikipedia might benefit from an increased page rank, but it’s for a non-profit cause which aims at helping everyone.

Let’s step back, Dan. If Google’s servers were destroyed in targeted terrorism attacks tomorrow, what would happen to the PageRank system and the time and effort everyone spent on SEO?

There’s a reason no other search engine (to my knowledge) uses the algorithms that Google does, primarily because like the recipe for Coke, nobody knows what it is.

Wikipedia operates under the presumption that robotic algorithms should not be trusted as much as a collaborative group of people. Wouldn’t you want to trust where to bring your car by word of mouth and not what a computer tells you?