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

[Stephen Bain]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)
<newyorkbrad at gmail.com> wrote:
> A couple of months ago, I raised on this list the issue of "no-indexing"
> Wikipedia pages outside the mainspace, principally including project-space
> pages such as XfDs, AN/ANI, RfA's, RfAr's, and the like, but possibly
> including userspace as well.  By no-indexing, I refer to coding these pages
> such that they will not be picked up by Google or other search engines.

Note that much of this is already done, see our robots file:

http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt

Currently all AFD, RFA, RFC and RFAR subpages (but not the main AFD
page, the main RFA page etc) are blocked from indexing. Of your
examples the admin noticeboard and userspace are probably the big
examples of pages that are still indexed that we might not want to be
so.

Note that the robots file can easily be updated by a request on
bugzilla [1] if there is consensus for it.

> - That Wikipedia currently lacks a top-quality internal search capability,
> and therefore we need to be able to use external search engines such as
> Google to perform administrator functions and the like.  There is some merit

On this point, there's been great improvement in MediaWiki's search
capabilities this year with the MWSearch backend coming online.

----
[1] Like this request, for example:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10288

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com