I have a couple of persistent problem users on my watchlist at the moment, both of whom persistently obfuscate the titles of articles they created and which have since been deleted, in an attempt to keep their shenanigans off the Google results for the subjects (Ecopave and Patrick Buri for the interested).
Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project space are excluded from the Google indexing? What about deleted-protected?
Guy (JzG)
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
I have a couple of persistent problem users on my watchlist at the moment, both of whom persistently obfuscate the titles of articles they created and which have since been deleted, in an attempt to keep their shenanigans off the Google results for the subjects (Ecopave and Patrick Buri for the interested).
Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project space are excluded from the Google indexing? What about deleted-protected?
I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even having talk pages indexed. Is there a way of doing it so it would be picked up across mirrors too? I have no idea of how it's done beyond the no robots or something command in the headers. I have a feeling this is a perennial though.
Steve block
Steve Block wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
I have a couple of persistent problem users on my watchlist at the moment, both of whom persistently obfuscate the titles of articles they created and which have since been deleted, in an attempt to keep their shenanigans off the Google results for the subjects (Ecopave and Patrick Buri for the interested).
Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project space are excluded from the Google indexing? What about deleted-protected?
I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even having talk pages indexed. Is there a way of doing it so it would be picked up across mirrors too? I have no idea of how it's done beyond the no robots or something command in the headers. I have a feeling this is a perennial though.
Steve block
Would it be possible to set up a Google Sitemap that gives very low priority to project-space pages? I often find it useful to search for project pages at Wikipedia, but the built-in search engine doesn't support some querying features that Google does, like placing phrases in quotes.
I'm with Nguyen. It would be a shame to have problem users take away a useful tool. Google is very useful to look for Ref desk answers for example. The Wikipedia search engine is usually crap. Besides, why worry if they try to keep their shenanigans off google. We have other ways of finding out and if it's not on Google less people will find the crap by accident.
Mgm
On 10/24/06, Minh Nguyen mxn@zoomtown.com wrote:
Steve Block wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
I have a couple of persistent problem users on my watchlist at the moment, both of whom persistently obfuscate the titles of articles they created and which have since been deleted, in an attempt to keep their shenanigans off the Google results for the subjects (Ecopave and Patrick Buri for the interested).
Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project space are excluded from the Google indexing? What about deleted-protected?
I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even having talk pages indexed. Is there a way of doing it so it would be picked up across mirrors too? I have no idea of how it's done beyond the no robots or something command in the headers. I have a feeling this is a perennial though.
Steve block
Would it be possible to set up a Google Sitemap that gives very low priority to project-space pages? I often find it useful to search for project pages at Wikipedia, but the built-in search engine doesn't support some querying features that Google does, like placing phrases in quotes.
-- Minh Nguyen mxn@zoomtown.com [[en:User:Mxn]] [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]] AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn@myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/
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On 10/25/06, jf_wikipedia@mac.com jf_wikipedia@mac.com wrote:
On Oct 24, 2006, at 10:11 AM, Steve Block wrote:
I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even having talk pages indexed.
I would support that as well.
-- Jossi
Then how would you search project and talk space effectively for specific piece of text?
Mgm
On 10/25/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/25/06, jf_wikipedia@mac.com jf_wikipedia@mac.com wrote:
On Oct 24, 2006, at 10:11 AM, Steve Block wrote:
I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even having talk pages indexed.
I would support that as well.
-- Jossi
Then how would you search project and talk space effectively for specific piece of text?
If they vamped up MediaWiki's internal search engine that could serve as a way of crawling the whole site without broadcasting our dirty laundry to the outside world.
It's very easy to make entire namespaces un-Googled (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt). We've already made AFD votes un-Googleable (since nobody likes having "not notable" come up when you put their name into Google). If we could rely on Wiki's own search engine for internal things it would make it pretty safe to turn off Google indexing for talk pages.
I think project namespace should remain Google-able, though -- there are some which are quite core to what Wikipedia is and it would be quite strange not to be able to find them via Google. But the contents of talk pages of all sorts I don't think need to be aired to the whim of Googling. They don't necessarily contain useful information at all -- usually they are full of squabbles about what constitutes useful information, which while interesting to the sociologist is not necessarily the best face to put forward.
FF
Tuesday, October 24, 2006, 2:26:18 PM, Guy wrote:
Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project space are excluded from the Google indexing? What about deleted-protected?
I often find useful to use google to search in the talk page/user/project space. Maybe they should have a much lower rank, but for that we should talk to the google guys. :-)