2008/4/28 Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com:
User:, User_talk: and Wikipedia: are useless search results for those outside of our project. So, in my opinion, is Talk:.
Google indexing seems to return these internal pages with the same rating as mainspace pages, where they clearly aren't. Us allowing this to continue is a bug.
This also gives the odd effect where if someone creates an article on themselves, and we helpfully userfy it... they end up with what they originally wanted, a Wikipedia article on themselves that turns up in Google. The average reader does not pay much attention to pagename prefixes, and we get not infrequent emails along the lines of "...why on earth is "User:JoeSmith" remaining as an article? It's clearly [fiction / nonsense / insignificant]..."
I would quite like some way for non-article pages - which, after all, look like articlespace to any casual reader - to be obviously Not An Article, or at least Not The Same As Mainspace. Any suggestions? Big red border?