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

[Yann Forget]

Gregory Maxwell a écrit :
> 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.

I understand what you want to do, but what benefit you expect from such
a change.

>>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?

Good question. Yes, this should be addressed fist obviously.

Regards,

Yann