[WikiEN-l] no-index certain BLPs??

doc doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com
Sun May 6 15:03:27 UTC 2007


"I don't want to be number one on Google. This is the position I 
expressed to Brad Patrick over a year ago. I could live with a bio under 
those conditions. ... All it would take is a new flag in the system to 
generate a "noindex" meta in the header of certain articles. You 
wouldn't have to change robots.txt. It might be slightly easier than 
getting the article deleted, and it could be one option to offer BLP 
victims short of a deletion" (Brandt)

Why not agree to this?

In saying that, I'm not arguing that Brandt should be treated 
differently, but we could consider the following options:

1) *no index bios on subject's request*. We keep the info, but the 
subject doesn't have an article on them , with all the vandalism or POV 
pushing risks, as top on google. They don't need to check their article 
everyday.

OR

2) *no index all low-notability living-person bios* which have 
experienced any problems. Any admin, or OTRS op seeing repeat problems 
can flag it as such, reducing the collateral damage if their are future 
issues.

OR

3) *no index ALL BLPs* - being in [[category:Living persons]] could 
automatically flag the article. This would be easiest to maintain, and 
apply consistently. The argument against it will be that it will take 
[[George W. Bush]] etc off google, but if it were combined with stable 
versions, so that all BLPs were removed from Google UNLESS they were 
stable, we might have a workable solution. The popular ones are likely 
to have stable versions very quickly. Incidentally, this would also 
reduce the attraction of vanity bios.

Is this crazy?

Doc




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