From: WJhonson@aol.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] No-indexing of project-space pages
Hypothetical arguments aren't very convincing to me. If someone were willing to point out a "real world" case where our indexing of user, user-talk and article-talk pages is doing some horrible damage that is not already existing in-fact then fine, do so.
So far I haven't seen it. I like fixing problems that actually exist, versus ones who only exist potentially.
Will Johnson
Perhaps a different angle would help?
One thing no-indexing user and user talk namespaces would help with is to curb the recent trend of userpage spam. I see half a dozen or more userpages a day which are spam or masquerading as articles. If userspace wasn't indexed, pretty soon the companies/persons who attempt this sort of advertising will figure out it doesn't work; no one ever finds their "article" from Google or Yahoo.
The most recent example that springs into my mind is [[User:Kliff Hanger Dot Com]] (whose page I didn't think spamish enough to delete, though I still blanked it), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kliff_Hanger_Dot_Com . There's no question that page should not be sitting around in userspace where people can Google it.
Just my two cents on this, since the BLP angle is getting kind of tired. Cheers.
[[User:Lifebaka]]