A couple of months ago, I raised on this list the issue of "no-indexing" Wikipedia pages outside the mainspace, principally including project-space pages such as XfDs, AN/ANI, RfA's, RfAr's, and the like, but possibly including userspace as well. By no-indexing, I refer to coding these pages such that they will not be picked up by Google or other search engines. The desirability of this change has been noted by many people, including very experienced Wikipedians. As we all know, the popularity of Wikipedia and the intensive number of internal links means that when a Wikipedia page contains the name of a living individual, then unless the person is either extremely notable or happens to have a common name, that page will almost inevitably become a high-ranking, if not the highest ranking, search engine result for that individual. This raises issues enough when the search result is a BLP or other mainspace article, but it is totally unacceptable when the high-ranking result destined to follow the individual around forever is something like: - An AfD deciding to delete an article about a person because of her perceived lack of any sufficiently notable or meaningful accomplishments in life (these can be courtesy-blanked on request, but how many subjects know how even to ask); or - An RfA, involving a contributor who happens to edit under his real name, which fails because the user was deemed unqualified for adminship; or - An arbitration case, in which an editor was severely criticized or even banned for violations of Wikipedia policy - regrettable, but not something for which it would serve any purpose to tar the person's RL reputation forever; or - A long and heated discussion in an ancient ANI thread, again involving a contributor who edits using her name, involving some ancient wiki-grievance long forgotten ... until the contributor applies for a scholarship or a job and someone Googles her name; or - An ArbCom election in which the user came in 17th place; or - An SSP report in which a user editing under a new name is indelibly linked to a username based on his real name, which he chose to abandon months or years earlier because of precisely these very concerns; or - A discussion on ANI noticeboard of defamatory or privacy-invading material in a BLP or other article, which it is rightfully decided to delete from the article itself ... except it remains preserved in the noticeboard discussion (I do see that this aspect of the problem has been addressed on the BLP noticeboard archives, but this type of discussion occurs on ANI and elsewhere as well); or - Various other places where these issues, involving both article subjects and Wikipedia contributors, continue to arise on a frequent basis. It has been observed that being named on Wikipedia, whether for legitimate reasons or otherwise, has a powerful potential to damage a person's life. (See for example the BLP policy and its talkpage, the ArbCom decisions in RfAr/Badlydrawnjeff and RfAr/Footnoted quotes, or discussion on various criticism sites.) As noted, this raises a troublesome enough suite of issues when the person in question has been accurately discussed in the encyclopedia itself. It is really not acceptable when it occurs as a happenstance of an ancillary discussion of an article subject or of a contributor (even a misbehaving or a now-unwelcome contributor). I have read more than enough complaints from people who have found themselves in many of the unfortunate situations I describe here. If they are Wikipedians, they sometimes come to rue the day they ever thought of contributing, much less contributing under a name linked to their real identity. If they are article subjects with no particular connection to Wikipedia, they must surely find the situation maddening. By comparison, the benefits to the general public of being able to read through internal Wikipedia discussions of this nature as the result of a casual Google search must be reckoned, at the best, as slight. In the prior thread, I believe there was significant support for implementing coding necessary to cause "no-indexing" of projectspace and possibly userspace and other-space pages. The main counter-arguments were: - That some project-space pages DO warrant indexing. An example that was given was the notability policy or the BLP policy. The solution to this is to have a "yes-index" feature that would override the no-index code on a particular project-space page where indexing was agreed to be affirmatively desirable. Community discussion could come up with a list of those particular pages in a week or so. - That Wikipedia currently lacks a top-quality internal search capability, and therefore we need to be able to use external search engines such as Google to perform administrator functions and the like. There is some merit to this observation; I certainly have used Google to hunt down references I remembered when I was writing arbitration decisions, for example. But internal administrative convenience is not a good argument to disregard real harm that we are inadvertently causing to specific individuals. The developers can and probably should be tasked, as a high priority, with improving the search capabilities; but it has been too long since the problems I have described in this e-mail were identifed, and it is time they were solved. - The most cynical response has been that Wikipedia thrives on Google-rank created by internal links and is not going to do anything that would lessen its page-ranks, whether out of pride or for some conjectured eventual mercenary reason. Actually, this was not a counter-argument presented on Wikien; it's a cynical speculation about motivations that was presented on a criticism site. I give it no credence, but it would be easy enough to disprove once and for all. Wikipedia and its community are often criticized for irresponsibly neglecting the negative effects of the project on some of its subjects and some of its contributors. We have here an opportunity to take an incremental but meaningful step toward addressing a group of related, significant concerns. I would like to urge that the on-again, off-again discussion of this proposal proceed to a conclusion either here or on-wiki and that some definitive action be taken in the near future. (Finally, I would appreciate if responses could focus on the substance of this post and not on the identity of its author.) Regards, Newyorkbrad