In a message dated 7/23/2008 1:17:52 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, risker.wp@gmail.com writes:
Google for the user? Really? You can't find talk pages or user contribution histories with out Google?>>
--------------- You know perfectly well (I think) that that is not to what I refer. I'm not looking for the user's page, but rather the user, wherever they appear.
If there is an allusion to so-and-so getting into a nasty fight with such-and-such, I need to look for the two of them together to see what it's about. It's not perfectly likely that that fight appeared on either user or user talk pages of *them* but it may appear on the talk page of somebody else.
Historians need to preserve the ability to biograph the historians themselves. That is part of the history of Wikipedia. We are not just a series of articles, but rather individuals and some of those individuals create intriguing historians of their own. Noindexing user talk pages effectively wipes the ability to learn whatever-can-be-known about the people who create Wikipedia.
Will Johnson
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