On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Jonathan Hughes <lifebaka(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
One thing no-indexing user and user talk
namespaces would help with is
to
curb the recent trend of userpage spam. I see
half a dozen or more
userpages a day which are spam or masquerading as articles. If
userspace
wasn't indexed, pretty soon the
companies/persons who attempt this sort
of
advertising will figure out it doesn't work;
no one ever finds their
"article" from Google or Yahoo.
The most recent example that springs into my mind is [[User:Kliff Hanger
Dot
Com]] (whose page I didn't think spamish enough to delete, though I
still
blanked it),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kliff_Hanger_Dot_Com .
There's no question that page should not be sitting around in userspace
where people can Google it.
Do you really think noindexing of user pages would make any difference
there? The page is obviously self-promotional, but I would think the
purpose is more to promote oneself to Wikipedians, not to random Google
searchers.
I don't even agree with you that "there's no question" that user page
shoudn't be in Google. Wikipedians seem to have chosen to not allow
certain
types of self-promotion on user pages, but that's by no means a policy
which
is beyond question. Most websites *allow* blatant self-promotion on
people's user page equivalents - for example, Google Knol certainly
wouldn't
delete a page like this, and they wouldn't noindex it either. Unless
there's some other info I'm missing, I'd assume good faith here and give
the
person who created that page the benefit of the doubt; assume that they
weren't aware of the rules and thought there was nothing wrong with what
they were doing. (As an aside, had the user chosen the username "Klff
Hanger", and made a few contributions to articles, I don't even see a
rules
violation, though I admit I'm not up to date on the current !rules. I can
think of lots of user pages which are self-promotional.)
Of course, this brings up another issue, which I think is the real problem
with indexing user and user talk pages (as well as project and project
talk
pages). User pages probably *should* be in search engines, they just
shouldn't be ranked nearly as highly as they tend to be.
In hindsight, these pages probably should have been put on a different
domain name, and probably a single domain name for all users in all
projects. That's probably a long way off if it ever gets implemented at
all
(with SUL now mostly? complete it's a possibility), but one thing that can
be done today is that nofollow can be applied to links to these
pages. Then
at least the search engines will give them a lower rank. Maybe I should
submit a couple bug reports.
_______________________________________________
My initial concerns when I started this thread related primarily to
project-space pages, not userspace, and I would propose that the former be
addressed first to avoid the typical situation where the discussion meanders
in various directions and therefore comparatively little actually gets
done. There is absolutely no reason that after several months of
discussion DRV, AN/ANI/AN3, SSP, RfCU, WQA, and the former PAIN and CSN
archives are, to the best of my knowledge, still searchable.
My own view with respect to userspace is that the individual user should
probably have the ability to decide whether he or she wants his or her pages
indexed, subject to override where necessary (e.g., an indefblocked user's
page should not be indexed). I don't have a strong view on whether
userpages should be presumptively indexed with the user having the ability
to opt out, or presumptively no-indexed with the user having the ability to
opt in.
Newyorkbrad