On 10/25/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/25/06, jf_wikipedia(a)mac.com
<jf_wikipedia(a)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