2008/7/23 WJhonson@aol.com:
Killing a mosquito with a hammer is not the proper approach however.
Most of, if not all the major issues NYB brought up, were addressed already.
User and user talk pages, DRV and others have not been addressed. It is time to close the loop.
<snip> Often I simply know that there is some issue with a certain user, and I want to know what it IS, since some nellies on here won't just come right out and say it directly (read that tongue-in-cheek). My sole recourse is to Google for the user. Many, but not all, of these hits are to internal Wikipedia pages. How can a historian accurately track the meta-project if we're going to suppress the very pages that are most needed?
Google for the user? Really? You can't find talk pages or user contribution histories with out Google?
Meta-project pages are all still there within the mediawiki search function. Unlike some people who seem to need google to find anything for them, I have never once had a problem finding the desired page using the in-house search engine, wonky as it is, and it keeps improving over time.
The only thing that noindexing User and User Talk pages will do, is give ammunition to those who already loudly trumpet that we hide actions of malevolent editors.. admins.. bureaucrats.. and arbcom members. Because now, we've made it 20 times harder to actually track those actions.
You haven't been paying attention. There are all kinds of BLP violations on user and user talk pages, the vast majority of them unrecognised and unaddressed. Those pages often turn up in top 10 google hits, and often perpetuate the BLP problems that may have assiduously been removed from articles and even article talk. Articles need to be indexed. Community gossip does not.
The encyclopedia is about articles. That is what our readership wants to have at their fingertips. I doubt in the extreme that 99.998% of the people who have accessed Wikipedia in the past 24 hours care even so much as one tidbit who our admins are, or what our dispute resolution system is, or whether I exchanged greetings with anyone on my userpage. But I am sure that there are plenty of non-Wikipedians who are flabbergasted to google themselves and find nasty things written about themselves on a wikipedia page that doesn't even look like an article.
This is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
Risker