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(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On 08/09/2007, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)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.