[WikiEN-l] Bans and online/offline reputation (was Re: Follow-up on my Ban from Wikipedia (part 3))

[David Goodman]

For slightly different reasons i would strongly support this. our
internal operations are public, but there is a difference between
public and in-your-face. I think user namespace should be unindexed; I
think WP namespace should be unindexed. I would even go one step
further, and say that talk pages in even article namespace should not
be indexed.  They would still of course be searchable from within WP.
Nobody would lose access.  the journalists looking for the dark
secrets would still be able to find them. The material would still be
in the database dump.

We talk about having a relatively stable public layer. The first step
is to do something about the totally uncontrolled non-encyclopedic
parts.

On 9/8/07, Armed Blowfish <diodontida.armata at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 08/09/2007, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Thomas Dalton wrote:
> >>> I think making the pages available in high-ranking Google
> >>> results is more than 'transparency', it's shouting out to
> >>> the world.
> >>>
> >> Google's rankings are Google's responsibility. Wikipedia has never
> >> worried about search engine rankings, we just do what we think best
> >> and let the search engines do what they think best. Fortunately, those
> >> generally coincide, so Wikipedia has very high rankings, but we don't
> >> make any special effort to achieve those rankings. We also don't make
> >> any special effort to get rid of them.
> >
> > This appears to be sound reasoning.  Basing our activity on "What does
> > Google think?" is a cyber-equivalent to letting your home decisions be
> > guided by what the neighbours think.  It relinquishes control to outside
> > elements who have no vested interest in your efforts.
> >
> > Ec
>
> Wikipaedia is posting negative information about relatively
> private individuals... or are banned users considered so
> notable now that BLP does not apply?  Are you so determined
> to take revenge on those that are banned that you must
> destroy their online and offline reputations as much as
> possible?
>
> Wikipaedia does control its robots.txt files.  The encyclopaedic
> namespaces are the main namespace and the image namespace.
> What does the rest contain that so needs to be indexed by
> Google that you do not care how many people's reputations
> are destroyed, or how many Wikipaedians are tracked by
> other websites?
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.