On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Brion Vibberbrion@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 7/27/09 10:03 AM, Robert Rohde wrote:
Forgive me, but that seems like you'd be asking the community to do a huge amount of work (moving images and updating [[File:]] calls) in order to address a problem that could be solved on purely technical grounds.
There's no technical need to change anything; ***Google already knows what our site looks like and indexes our image pages just fine since years ago***.
Google indexes the WMF this way. ***They do not index third party Mediawiki sites this way.***
Compare:
http://www.google.com/search?q=file:*.jpg+site:wikimedia.org
Which shows no end of *.jpg Image description pages on Commons to
http://www.google.com/search?q=file:*.jpg+site:mediawiki.org http://www.google.com/search?q=file:*.jpg+site:memory-alpha.org http://www.google.com/search?q=file:*.jpg+site:stargate.wikia.com
Which show no *.jpg image description pages on mediawiki.org, memory-alpha.org, or stargate.wikia.org
So congratulations Google treats the WMF special, but the rest of the Mediawiki user base, myself included, still have a problem that we would like to see solved.
-Robert Rohde