Rob Church wrote:
On 08/05/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
I oppose this. We should not have articles invisible to search engines. Either the page gets deleted, or it stays. None of this monkey business.
I concur, for a change. ;) Wikipedia is supposed to be an information resource, and search engines are the main means of finding such resources on the web. While I strongly sympathise with any victims of libel, and join the call to tighten up on it, I feel it's important to continue supporting indexing of all articles.
I would suggest a better idea would be to find some means of asking Google to update caches and indexes for a particular page "right now" for these cases.
Rob Church
Rob,
Need a solution that balances both concerns. How about if an article is placed under WP:OFFICE then it gets removed from the index. This would be managable.
Erik,
There is such a thing as a 1st ammendment right of "expressive association". There may be a sound basis for reviewing the issues of search engines and their artificial pay-for-rankings scheme. I mean, if WP is free content, then why again should we allow Google to reorder our information for paying customers by scraping every template and corner of WP? There is no "higher morality" in allowing search engines to decide what we publish (since they filter it anyway for a fee) nor is it "more open".
Putting some controls there to get rid of more complaints might be worth the tradeof, particularly since the whole "Google is Divine and Open" view (which it is really not) is only illusionary - the way Google wants all of us to believe.
Jeff
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