On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
could somebody think of a reliable way to do this, short of creating a separate name-space?
From a technical standpoint we just need a way to either:
1. Insert any <meta/> tag from the article content. (Bad idea for security reasons.)
2. Make some template-esque tag like {{{noindex}}} that will instruct the engine to include the following tag in the <head/> element:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Note that nofollow should not be present, because we do want it to crawl to the linked articles. We just don't want the category indexed.
This tag should follow transclusion rules -- then we could just insert this into whatever template we currently use to mark such categories (if any).
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.
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.