On 08/09/2007, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
I think making the pages available in high-ranking Google results is more than 'transparency', it's shouting out to the world.
Google's rankings are Google's responsibility. Wikipedia has never worried about search engine rankings, we just do what we think best and let the search engines do what they think best. Fortunately, those generally coincide, so Wikipedia has very high rankings, but we don't make any special effort to achieve those rankings. We also don't make any special effort to get rid of them.
This appears to be sound reasoning. Basing our activity on "What does Google think?" is a cyber-equivalent to letting your home decisions be guided by what the neighbours think. It relinquishes control to outside elements who have no vested interest in your efforts.
Ec
Wikipaedia is posting negative information about relatively private individuals... or are banned users considered so notable now that BLP does not apply? Are you so determined to take revenge on those that are banned that you must destroy their online and offline reputations as much as possible?
Wikipaedia does control its robots.txt files. The encyclopaedic namespaces are the main namespace and the image namespace. What does the rest contain that so needs to be indexed by Google that you do not care how many people's reputations are destroyed, or how many Wikipaedians are tracked by other websites?