Wikipedia and SEO - stolen/inferior content, no references, nofollow and abusive editors

I'd like to share my experiences with Wikipedia (no link love). Actually they are not entirely mine but more like a friends frustrations with it.

We all know wikipedia as the free encyclopedia, free knowledge gathered by volunteers. If you think about it like this it's pretty great. But there is always a catch! Lets say you are a specialist in your field and you write a technical article on your site. A few weeks later somebody who has read your article will post a similar one on wikipedia. If he has some common sense he will rephrase it and add his own opinions and understanding of it. Generally it's going to be an inferior article, but guess what: because wikipedia has such a trust in google's eyes (and who wouldn't with milions of articles posted) it's going to outrank you and every other specialist in the field. You don't get traffic anymore, they do.

Now why did I say inferior content? Because most contributors are not specialists. When one comes and spots a major mistake and makes a change it's going to reverted/changed back by the hoard of amateurs that float around each article. Wikipedia promotes inferior content, that has lots of mistakes. But as 'inferior' as it is it's going to outrank you, no doubt about that.

Wikipedia has grown so much because of the links everybody gives them. Yet they don't give anybody any juice back. Not even when they use stuff from their websites. All links on wikipedia are nofollowed. Even like this editors/admins don't like it when you add links at the references. Not even if part of the article has obviously been taken from your site. This is happened to a good friend of mine: one day he decides to copyscrape the site to see who is stealing articles from him these days (this happens a lot). Surprisingly first link shown is a wikipedia article. He checks it out and he finds out that somebody has made a wiki article based on his, and even copied 2-3 sentences. He says: "well at least they don't make money like other scraper sites do from my work. I'll just let it be". He decided to place his site link down in the bottom at the references (as it should have been done in the first place!). A few mins after that, an angry admin (or whatever he was - not a simple contributor anyway) reverts his changes and tells him in a very rude way that he isn't allowed to add his own site and that it won't do any good anyway since the links are nofollowed. Well that was nice. They steal content, don't put any references (if they do it's no juice anyway) and if you dare to put a link to the information the article actually uses they call you a spammer.

Spread the word people. Remove whatever links to wikipedia you have on your sites...or at least put a nofollow to them. Don't give more PR and Trust to wikipedia pages. Link to real specialist websites!