On 08/09/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com 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.
Wikipaedia can keep the high rankings in the article and image namespaces and tell Google not to index the other namespaces. Wikipaedia's robots.txt files are its responsibility. See original message for the possible benefits of this, not just for banned users but for everyone.
Discussions leading up to a person's ban are often fraught with general nastiness, to the point of serious BLP concerns. Some banned users who were known by their real names have even complained of libel. (I'm not a lawyer and can't evaluate that, but anyway.) These are real people, with feelings, friends, and jobs, and ought to be treated as such.