Based on the comments on the task (and personally looking at the associated data), this is not a one click fix, and will require community involvement.
My current assumption is that the reason a lot of pages are not getting indexed is that we do not have enough wikilinks between articles across Wikisource (leading to orphans and walled gardens). Even those that have wikilinks are often from linked list-style articles (contents pages, categories and such) which are not being traversed by Google (I assume due to some internal criteria that maps the quality of a page based on the content).
One potential way to mitigate this (which I suggested in the task) would be to implement a mechanism similar to navboxes/See also sections on Wikipedia?
Another potential way that we could go about this could be to make Author: pages less list-like, having some kind of summary of each work being linked (this is based on looking at the content on en and bn wikisource) ?
Regards, Sohom Datta --- Open-source contributor @Wikimedia
On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 12:21 PM Bodhisattwa bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com wrote:
Hello all,
Apologies for cross-posting.
For those who have not noticed till now, Google is not indexing any Wikisource language editions for the last couple of years which practically means that any Wikisource contents in any languages, which are being created in these years, are not searchable on Google and hence largely remain invisible on the web.
This is an extremely demotivating and frustrating situation for the existing Wikisource volunteers to witness, draining away all of our past and current efforts to bring and retain viewers, readers, GLAM partners and any potential new editors. We already have a very low awareness and visibility about Wikisource among general internet users due to lack of organized support in these years but the invisibility on Google search engine could become the last nail in our coffin, unless it is fixed soon.
There is a phabricator ticket raised by Darwinius back in December 2022 - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325607.
Can't this issue be put into priority by sys admins and WMF to work upon? Wikisource is still a sister project of Wikimedia and it needs some very basic care, after all.
Regards, Bodhisattwa (Bengali Wikisource volunteer)
Wikisource-l mailing list -- wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikisource-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org