Hi all,
I am Jorge Vargas, Director of Partnerships at WMF. It was lovely to see many of you in person last week in Singapore! Hope you’re all doing well and energized after a week of celebration and learning, for those who were in person as well as online.
As Nicholas Perry shared on August 3rd on this list, we are already working with Google to get more information from their Indexing team to learn more about how this works on their side. As he also mentioned, we don’t have any influence or can decide what Google indexes or where Wikimedia content ranks in their search. Some potential solutions would also rely more on our platform than theirs. Additionally, the Google folks at the “Mind the Gap” event in their Singapore office were probably not the best suited to provide further information on this particular topic, something we shared with Butch and others before Wikimania.
Several Google representatives attended the entire Wikimania conference to learn more about our Communities and Movement. Hopefully, some of you had an opportunity to talk to them then. We’ve seen for the last years Google's increasing interest in learning and working closer with us to be as aligned as possible. In this line, we are working with them to find the right people to get more guidance about how indexing works. This matter has not only been raised with them already regarding Wikisource but also regarding some language Wikipedias as well.
I will share an update on this thread as soon as more information is available. In the meantime, feel free to contact me, Nicholas, or partnerships@wikimedia.org if we can clarify anything else.
Best,
Jorge
