I don't understand why you make it about "winning". I don't think that either Andrew or I were approaching it in that spirit. Being dismissive from the beginning of possible solutions doesn't solve anything either. Both ideas being presented are possibilities, and no-one is treating them as certainties.
Wanting people to use your encyclopedia is an underlying theme in the same way that any author would want the public to read his book. Sure we want people to use Wikipedia, and showing up in search engines will enhance the possibility of that happening. Nevertheless that should not be the driving force behind the way we do things. Having a good product is far more important than marketing that product. Wikipedia did not get where it is by developing a marketing strategy. We don't need to engage in grandstanding to develop an audience.
We don't want people to look ONLY at Wikipedia. We want our readers to find alternatives, and must support teachers who downgrade student papers when those students use Wikipedia as the only source for significant facts in that paper. We are not the Borg.
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Brock Weller wrote:
And Andrew wins. Stable versioning wont solve anything, nor will noindexing. Part of being an encyclopedia means wanting people to use you, which (for one on-line) means showing up in search engines.
On 5/26/07, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 26/05/07, Ray Saintonge wrote:
David Mestel wrote:
You said Devs said "No" to noindexing given pages, right? It's too bad we
can't make a template for all BLPs that injects noindex...
That seems a bit pointless to me: either we want people to find an article
or we don't. If we don't, I have a better solution: delete it. If we do,
why not let the search engines index it?
Stable versioning has been imminent for a long time now. Perhaps when it is operational indexing should only apply to stable versions.
That wouldn't really solve the problem at all - it's quite possible to have a stable-but-crap article. "Stable" only really means "pretty likely it doesn't say Joe is Gay anywhere"...