Use On Other Websites
MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia, was equipped with nofollow support soon after initial announcement in 2005. The option was enabled on most Wikipedias. One of the prominent exceptions was the English Wikipedia. Initially, after a discussion, it was decided not to use rel="nofollow" in articles and to use a URL blacklist instead. In this way, English Wikipedia contributed to the scores of the pages it linked to, and expected editors to link to relevant pages.
In May 2006, a patch to MediaWiki software allowed to enable nofollow selectively in namespaces. This functionality was used on pages that are not considered to be part of the actual encyclopedia, such as discussion pages and resources for editors. Following increasing spam problems and a within-Foundation request from founder Jimmy Wales, rel="nofollow" was added to article-space links in January 2007. However, the various interwiki templates and shortcuts that link to other Wikimedia Foundation projects and many external wikis such as Wikia are not affected by this policy.
Other websites like Slashdot, with high user participation, add rel="nofollow" only for potentially misbehaving users. Potential spammers posing as users can be determined through various heuristics like age of registered account and other factors. Slashdot also uses the poster's karma as a determinant in attaching a nofollow tag to user submitted links.
Social bookmarking and photo sharing websites that use the rel="nofollow" tag for their outgoing links include YouTube and Digg.com (for most links); websites that don't use the rel="nofollow" tag include Propeller.com (no longer an active website) (formerly Netscape.com), Yahoo! My Web 2.0, and Technorati Favs.
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