One of the issues that has not been addressed here is some of the stuff that is being stored in userspace.
Disregarding the minimal (but not nonexistent) quantity of material being kept in user subpages which violates BLP, there is an astonishing number of fringe topics that are userfied upon AFD and sit, indefinitely, in userspace, where they are visible to search engines. A non-wikipedia user is not going to understand that, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xiutwel/7/7_Truth_Movement is not an article (it was deleted as conspiracy cruft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/7/7_Truth_Movem...), and an OR trainwreck like that is not enhancing Wikipedia's image. That user (who was recently topic-banned from all of the 9/11 articles) has about 20 deleted articles that have been userfied, some dating back to 2006, most of which have never been edited *at all* after userfication. I'm confident that there are other users who are doing the same thing; we found a user who was saving multiple versions of the save kiddie-porn pushing piece that had been deleted and endorsed; he was later indef-blocked, but it's likely that there's more of the same out there. There is nothing in userspace that needs to show up in Google search results; if nothing else, that section should be cordoned off to eliminate userfied and non-encyclopedic junk from polluting search engine hits.
Maybe we could have a constructive debate regarding this issue with the good people over at Google? Let's see what they think. Afterall, they have a lot of technical knowhow on searching, and have a corporate mantra that says "do no harm". If it would improve their search results, they might want to discuss a solution.
On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 10:33 PM, User Horologium user.horologium@gmail.com wrote:
One of the issues that has not been addressed here is some of the stuff that is being stored in userspace.
Disregarding the minimal (but not nonexistent) quantity of material being kept in user subpages which violates BLP, there is an astonishing number of fringe topics that are userfied upon AFD and sit, indefinitely, in userspace, where they are visible to search engines. A non-wikipedia user is not going to understand that, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xiutwel/7/7_Truth_Movement is not an article (it was deleted as conspiracy cruft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/7/7_Truth_Movem...), and an OR trainwreck like that is not enhancing Wikipedia's image. That user (who was recently topic-banned from all of the 9/11 articles) has about 20 deleted articles that have been userfied, some dating back to 2006, most of which have never been edited *at all* after userfication. I'm confident that there are other users who are doing the same thing; we found a user who was saving multiple versions of the save kiddie-porn pushing piece that had been deleted and endorsed; he was later indef-blocked, but it's likely that there's more of the same out there. There is nothing in userspace that needs to show up in Google search results; if nothing else, that section should be cordoned off to eliminate userfied and non-encyclopedic junk from polluting search engine hits.
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On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:55 AM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe we could have a constructive debate regarding this issue with the good people over at Google? Let's see what they think. Afterall, they have a lot of technical knowhow on searching, and have a corporate mantra that says "do no harm". If it would improve their search results, they might want to discuss a solution.
Yes, if they even think there is a problem. They have much much much better data than we do about what people are clicking through on when they search though. I don't think we should just assume that their results for such arcane terms like arbitration policy *are* bad in the first place. Everyone that uses google isn't looking to read a Wikipedia article. Some might actually be searching for our arbitration policy. :)