Michael Snow wrote:
doc wrote:
- *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
- *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
- *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.
While I sympathize with the reasons for concern, I object to treating parts of the encyclopedia differently in this manner. Backroom stuff like articles for deletion, I would agree. But not the encyclopedia proper. If we have articles that we don't want search engines to index, we should *delete* those articles.
The real answer is the increasingly urgent need to implement stable or reviewed versions of articles. In that context, it would certainly be possible to consider having a "noindex" attribute for articles that do not have any revision marked as having been reviewed.
--Michael Snow
Asking because I really don't know:
If we were to nofollow significant portions of Wikipedia -- for instance, all Biographies of Living People -- is it possible that Google (or others) will simply ignore the nofollow in that case?
I understand that Google says that it doesn't "special case" things. But might this become a significant test of that policy?
-Rich