[WikiEN-l] No-indexing of project-space pages

[Chris Howie]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Chris Howie <cdhowie at gmail.com> wrote:
>> P.S. Regarding Gregory's response (that came in while writing this)
>> potential abuse is not really a concern.  We have a block button.  The
>> trick is coming up with a policy or guideline on usage so people know
>> what's acceptable and what's not.
>
> It's not just me pointing this out... proposals like this have been
> previously rejected on this basis:
>
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9415
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8068
>
> Blocking is a good tool to stop abuse but it only works once we've
> found it. Someone could sneakily create __noindex__ pages, especially
> via transcluding no-indexing templates.

People do sneaky mainspace vandalism too.

>> Alternately (thinking while I type here, bear with me) we could have a
>> MediaWiki: page listing pages that we don't want indexed.  Possibly
>> specifying a template would catch all pages that template is
>> transcluded to?  Then it could be protected if it became an issue.
>
> Having to read some enormous page every page-load wouldn't be good. It
> would be better to do the right thing on average per-namespace then
> use something in the pages to control exceptions.

That is how I meant it -- a page of exceptions.  In the case of
categories, it could point at just a template we put on
non-encyclopedic categories, if "noindex-by-transclusion" can work.

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers