[WikiEN-l] Searchability of non-mainspace pages

[Delirium]

Matthew Brown wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 7:14 PM, Alex G <g1ggyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Not sold on the idea of all namespaces...AfD is currently blocked from
>>  google via robots.txt, I think we could use that for a few other pages. I
>>  don't think a global block on non-mainspace is needed, personally.
>>     
>
> User:, User_talk: and Wikipedia: are useless search results for those
> outside of our project.  So, in my opinion, is Talk:.
>
> Google indexing seems to return these internal pages with the same
> rating as mainspace pages, where they clearly aren't.  Us allowing
> this to continue is a bug.
>   
I don't see how it's a bug; if anything, the opposite would be a bug 
(and exceedingly unfriendly to boot). Wikipedia policy pages are 
important public information, and I frequently find them via search 
engines. If I search for "neutral point of view" on Google, I expect to 
find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view, not 
to find no results because of some stupid bureaucratic reason.

-Mark