[WikiEN-l] No-indexing of project-space pages

[Jonathan Hughes]

> From: WJhonson at aol.com
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] No-indexing of project-space pages
>
> Hypothetical arguments aren't very convincing to me.
> If someone were willing to point out a "real world" case where our indexing
> of user, user-talk and article-talk pages is doing some horrible damage
> that
> is  not already existing in-fact then fine, do so.
>
> So far I haven't seen it.  I like fixing problems that actually exist,
> versus ones who only exist potentially.
>
> Will Johnson


Perhaps a different angle would help?

One thing no-indexing user and user talk namespaces would help with is to
curb the recent trend of userpage spam.  I see half a dozen or more
userpages a day which are spam or masquerading as articles.  If userspace
wasn't indexed, pretty soon the companies/persons who attempt this sort of
advertising will figure out it doesn't work; no one ever finds their
"article" from Google or Yahoo.

The most recent example that springs into my mind is [[User:Kliff Hanger Dot
Com]] (whose page I didn't think spamish enough to delete, though I still
blanked it), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kliff_Hanger_Dot_Com .
There's no question that page should not be sitting around in userspace
where people can Google it.

Just my two cents on this, since the BLP angle is getting kind of tired.
Cheers.

[[User:Lifebaka]]