In a message dated 7/23/2008 8:16:12 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, szilagyi@gmail.com writes:
What is the benefit to allowing Google to index DRV, talk pages, and user/user talk pages?>>
---------------------------------------- Transparency. There is no benefit and a great drawback to not indexing. Not indexing makes it appear we are hiding something. That belief is already very prevalent among our critics, we don't want to feed them a ton of raw steak.
Will Johnson
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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 3:06 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Transparency. There is no benefit and a great drawback to not indexing. Not indexing makes it appear we are hiding something. That belief is already very prevalent among our critics, we don't want to feed them a ton of raw steak.
It's hard to hide things when our own search engine can find them too. And even if our own search was restricted to not search though some things, AfD for example (though not doing so would probably make a lot of people mad, and rightfully so), then someone interested enough could write a spider that ignores robot tags and fetches everything, then grep it.
Or hell, just download a database dump.
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 3:06 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Transparency. There is no benefit and a great drawback to not indexing. Not indexing makes it appear we are hiding something. That belief is already very prevalent among our critics, we don't want to feed them a ton of raw steak.
You are welcome to weigh the benefit as insufficient, when you say "no benefit" you're insulting several experienced and trusted users here who see substantial benefit.
I've yet to see anyone accuse us of hiding things on the basis of the many things we already no-index. Can you provide a pointer? On the flipside I can point to several examples of WP critics complaining that our sausage-making is showing up at the top of Google, above more useful links, just on the basis of our domain's high position.
If your concern is transparency and avoiding criticism for hiding things there are several gigantic elephants in the room that are not yet addressed which make no-indexing seem utterly insignificant by comparison. For example, consider the fact that deletion and oversight cause mis-attribution of edits, and that we frequently use deletion to hide widely linked to bad edits ... really to avoid people being mislead by the links, but someone could argue that we're hiding our errors).
On 7/23/08, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 7/23/2008 8:16:12 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, szilagyi@gmail.com writes:
What is the benefit to allowing Google to index DRV, talk pages, and user/user talk pages?>>
Transparency. There is no benefit and a great drawback to not indexing. Not indexing makes it appear we are hiding something. That belief is already very prevalent among our critics, we don't want to feed them a ton of raw steak.
Will Johnson
As was previously noted, pages such as AfD, RfA, and RfAr were apparently excluded from being indexed some time ago. (I apologize again for having missed this in my initial post, and am curious when it was done.) I have never heard of a single complaint regarding this change in procedure.
Wikipedia's critics have a broad range of views, and no one can anticipate every criticism that could (rightly or wrongly) be made. However, as noted, there have been relatively few objections raised to no-indexing most of the types of pages at issue other than purely logistical ones.
By contrast, several of Wikipedia's best-known critics have repeatedly and vociferously objected to the fact that negative comments about both contributors or article subjects -- including types of comments that would not be allowed in the encyclopedia itself -- are preserved forever on Wikipedia pages, and thus inevitably become high-ranking and permanent search engine results for these individuals. They are right to object, and Wikipedia should continue to address this well-known, longstanding, and readily fixable problem.
My concern with this issue is not an idiosyncratic one. I have seen others raise concerns surrounding this issue on-wiki, on this mailing list, on Bugzilla, had them expressed to me by a personal acquaintance who has encountered this issue, and also seen frequent references to the problem on a site in which many of "our critics," as well as many Wikipedians (who may of course also be critics), participate. Sometimes we may think that criticism of Wikipedia is misguided, but other times it has merit, and when it has merit we should act on it. In any event, the possibility that our critics would be affronted by our no-indexing these pages is purely speculative, while the fact that our critics (and many others) have raised entirely justified objections to our current practice is very real.
Newyorkbrad