Killing a mosquito with a hammer is not the proper approach however.
Most of, if not all the major issues NYB brought up, were addressed already.
In many cases, when I search for particular things in Google, I *do* in fact want to see the Wikipedia information, that's for what in-fact I'm searching. Our internal search engine does not do the same finesse and bag-of-tricks that Google can do, so it's not really an adequate replacement.
IF the programmers had some way of creating a Google-internal-only search engine, that is, it works exactly like Google and I mean exactly, and yet can only be accessed from inside the Wikipedia frame, that could possibly work.
Often I simply know that there is some issue with a certain user, and I want to know what it IS, since some nellies on here won't just come right out and say it directly (read that tongue-in-cheek). My sole recourse is to Google for the user. Many, but not all, of these hits are to internal Wikipedia pages. How can a historian accurately track the meta-project if we're going to suppress the very pages that are most needed?
The only thing that noindexing User and User Talk pages will do, is give ammunition to those who already loudly trumpet that we hide actions of malevolent editors.. admins.. bureaucrats.. and arbcom members. Because now, we've made it 20 times harder to actually track those actions.
If there are cases, and I do mean relatively few, they can be handled with oversight. If those with Oversight do not WISH those cases to vanish, then we should not be back-dooring that very situation. If we don't have enough oversighters to handle the vast volume (tongue-in-cheek) then we should promote more.
This is not the solution to that problem.
Will Jhonson
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