On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
- Make some template-esque tag like {{{noindex}}} that will instruct
the engine to include the following tag in the <head/> element:
Parser directives like __noindex__ are the mediawiki esq way of accomplishing things like this. ... but it's all the same..
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.
Also of relevance to this discussion please see: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11443
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.