On 10/25/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/25/06, jf_wikipedia@mac.com jf_wikipedia@mac.com wrote:
On Oct 24, 2006, at 10:11 AM, Steve Block wrote:
I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even having talk pages indexed.
I would support that as well.
-- Jossi
Then how would you search project and talk space effectively for specific piece of text?
If they vamped up MediaWiki's internal search engine that could serve as a way of crawling the whole site without broadcasting our dirty laundry to the outside world.
It's very easy to make entire namespaces un-Googled (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt). We've already made AFD votes un-Googleable (since nobody likes having "not notable" come up when you put their name into Google). If we could rely on Wiki's own search engine for internal things it would make it pretty safe to turn off Google indexing for talk pages.
I think project namespace should remain Google-able, though -- there are some which are quite core to what Wikipedia is and it would be quite strange not to be able to find them via Google. But the contents of talk pages of all sorts I don't think need to be aired to the whim of Googling. They don't necessarily contain useful information at all -- usually they are full of squabbles about what constitutes useful information, which while interesting to the sociologist is not necessarily the best face to put forward.
FF