[Commons-l] Commons search engine ranking, Was: Killing the main namespace?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/29/07, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> > I think galleries are useful.  I do not think they should be deleted.
> > Instead, I think we should make a new namespace called "gallery" and
> > move all the galleries there.
>
> Well I understand, but I am not sure what is the benefit expected here
> with the deletion of many pages from main namespace, and I don't see how
> it will be achieved.

We would automatically mass move all the pages with galleries to the
gallery namespace. Deletion could also be done automatically.

> Commons is generally very badly referenced.
> I think this is mainly because of the category system (maybe developers
> could give more hints here). For "Mohandas Gandhi" in Google Images, you
>  won't find any images directly from Commons. That's very surprising
> seeing that Commons is now the biggest source of free (as in beer)
> images of Gandhi.

The biggest factor for this is that most search engines will not index
pages with names which look like image names, for example
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Foo.jpg. They would index
Image:Foo but our image pages are not named like that.

Since most of the time when other sites (including Wikimedia's own)
link to commons they link to image pages, we do not gain 'googlejuice'
from those links.

There are a lot of things we could do to enhance the popularity of
commons, but the page name issue really should be solved first.

It's in the long term plans for mediawiki to support filenames which
are unrelated to the file type.... but even using that will require
massive renames on commons.  Does anyone have any suggestions?   There
are a lot of possibilities.

Another question is.. are we ready to handle an increase in public visibility?