I am not a fan of baseball and never heard of Barry Bonds before and a supporter of Wikipedia (who knows too well its flaws and weaknesses, but also benefits at the same time).

I got no bad opinion about Barry Bonds after reading this post. I understood that he is obviously famous and that something happened to put a dark spot on his long career.

Maybe Eric should add a link to a good news article about the “dark spot” AND one about his record to the article.

The phrases “his record” and “with an asterisk by his name” are the perfect spots for this references.

In Wikipedia would I mark those two with a “cite” template (citation needed), but its not Wikipedia hehe.

This different reactions come to no surprise to me, because if you mix two subjective things to make a point, this will happen. I fell into that trap myself in the past :).

Regarding Wikipedia content and ranking. I agree and disagree with you Eric. There were discussions in the past that suggest how Google might should treat different entries in Wikipedia. I won’t repeat all of this stuff, but want to mention that there are indicator in the code of Wikipedia articles that show the stage the article is in and its quality. For example the “stub” templates indicate that it is an article in its early stage and Google should not rank that one too high (if domain comes into play, add a penalty to those pages). On the other hand are there thousands of articles in status “good article” or “featured article”, which were scrutinized and reviewed multiple times before they got that status (which they can also lose anytime). Those articles actually deserve to rank #1 because of their quality.

Good post though.

Clean or not, we know (albeit, illegally) that he took steroids in the midst of his prime.

In a similar fashion, Wikipedia taints the search results despite their less than squeaky clean image.

Listen guys, the comparison in the above article was done to illustrate a point. If that was done, in your opinion, in poor taste — I’m sorry for that.

I do however appreciate your reading the article as well as commenting. I can guarantee you — Joseph, Increase PR and Billy — that your comments are not only read and understood, but they’ll also be factors in how I approach similar articles in the future.