On 17/09/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
suggestions for improvement heartily welcomed.
d.
Heartily welcomed? Erm... not usually....
Anyhow, the suggestion is: hide everything unencyclopaedic from Google -- basically everything but main space and image space.
Advantages: * Don't need to worry about BLP violations outside of the encyclopaedia showing up on top of Google * Hopefully less negative attention from outside - make Wikipaedians safer * Encourage Wikipaedians to feel safe revealing whatever personal info counts as 'accountability' without that info showing up on Google * The average reader won't be concerned with what goes on behind the scenes in wiki-building, no need to clog search engines shared with the rest of the world with all that * No loss in transparency - all info is still publicly available (not necessarily a good thing, but not a change either) * Discourage people not interested in encyclopaedia writing from using user pages as Myspace * Probably more things I can't think of at the moment....