Wikipedia is always in the middle of some brouhaha or another, and last week was a double-header.

First up, gums were a-flappin' over the encyclopedia's decision to tag all links on its site "nofollow," which will render those links invisible to search engines. Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing or just an unavoidable thing depends on who's talking.

Wikipedia says it's unavoidable because of the mischief caused on its site by spammers and search-engine optimization schemers.

Nick Carr was among the critics: "Wikipedia is adopting the policy to reduce spammers' incentives to add spam links to the encyclopedia. I wonder, though, if it could also have the effect of reinforcing Wikipedia's hegemony over search results.

The sources cited in Wikipedia, many of which are original sources, will no longer get credit for their appearance there, which should cause at least a little downward pressure in their own search rankings (hence providing a little more upward pressure, relatively speaking, for Wikipedia's articles). Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the 'Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any."

Wikipedia's case seems the more compelling here. After all, its primary mission is to provide a reliably usable online encyclopedia, not to ensure an enduring balance of benefits between link givers and link receivers. If someone has a better idea for solving Wikipedia's spam problem, then by all means let's hear it.