For the last two days, Afghanistan has been exploding
in demonstrations over Farkhunda, a Kabul woman who was >beaten to death and torched by
a mob. Even though every major news source has done a piece on her, I can't find an
>article for her yet in Wikipedia. When it does get written, and finally starts
showing up in the search engines, what will >it say? "Farkhunda", the logical
search term? Or more likely, the more common format: "the
>murder/lynching/battering/victimization/humiliation of [insert woman's name
here]".
[...]
For quite some time, the article for Ozgecan Aslan was
hidden from Google searches as well, because due to the >English Wikipedia's unique
naming conventions, the article was called "Murder of Özgecan Aslan".
This
is a Google problem, not a Wikipedia problem. And my answer, from personal experience, is
basically what you began with: Give it time.
In late January I began researching (well, actually, reviewing research I had already
done) and writing [[Death of Elisa Lam]], the idea being to get a hook from the article in
DYK on February 19, the two-year anniversary of the day her body was found (The people at
DYK were, despite the best efforts of myself and another editor there, unable to to do so,
so a different hook ran two days later and did a respectable amount of page views). Even
at that time, with the article having been in existence for almost a month, it still was
on the middle of the second page of Google results. But now it comes up as the first
result for “Elisa Lam.”
Some tips for gaming PageRank when you create articles like this:
a.. Make sure there’s a redirect from the subject’s name to the “death/murder of ...”
article.
b.. Make sure you have a few internal links from other articles. Lists are good for
this: every article about a notable missing-persons case can have an entry in, and link
to, [[List of people who disappeared mysteriously]].
Daniel Case
