Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Searchability of non-mainspace pages - Wikimedia-l

29 Apr 2008

Charles Matthews wrote:
...
  Well, maybe we should discuss the downside first. Not
having project
 pages on Google would certainly impede my work. You know, some of us
 still develop articles, and so on. 
This is a valid point, and I think it needs to be addressed in a couple 
of ways:

1. First, narrowing the scope of the noindex request.

2. Second, finding out what it would take to improve internal search to 
make it more usable for people developing articles and so on.

...
  Ah, but I do. Isn't it a better solution to blank
some AfDs, than to
 say "the mission has to come second"? After all, really negative
 material should be off the site, not just harder to find. 
I would support that for some kinds of pages, blanking should be the 
default upon the close of discussion.

-----

I wonder how hard it would be to have a technical change whereby 
articles could be tagged with a {{noindex}} template which would set the 
meta headers appropriately.  This could be liberally applied to project 
pages that may be magnets for bad behavior.

And then user space could be the only thing removed from google by default.

Thoughts?

--Jimbo