On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I am of the belief that only mainspace should be indexed by default, and that only limited project space (e.g., policies) should be indexed but that all other areas should be no-index by default. Userspace should default to no-index, in particular. I recall a very contentious BLP-related discussion that took place over several months, and was discussed not only in project space and on the talk pages of related articles, but was also discussed on multiple user pages. When I do a search for that subject now, ("name of celebrity" +"BLP issue" +wikipedia) what comes up is the many discussions on userpages, perpetuating the BLP problem.
Agreed: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-September/081682.html (and some other posts in that month; the link there at the time was to a google search that showed that 'Thomas Dalton' #1 hit on google was a "this user has been banned from Wikipedia" userpage notice)
I'd also add portal namespace to the indexable stuff. But yea... indexing Main + Portal + named pages elsewhere would be really good. It would produce the right results for the vast majority of the searchers.
(and I for one don't mind that this thread was began by an obviously evil troll! ;) )