Last modified: 2012-07-31 23:49:10 UTC
In the past external hyperlinks were marked with the rel="nofollow" parameter, however I have read that blackhat and other hackers are also using internal links to their advantage to boost the search engine views of Wikipedia pages that have references to their books, products, companies. I request that rel="nofollow" be added to internal hyperlinks as well to prevent these tactics.
This is somewhat related to bug 8410.
We can't add rel=nofollow to internal links because crawlers need to be able to follow those links in order to index the site in a useful way. I don't really see a problem with internal links being used to promote internal pages, that's what internal links are for.