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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Chris Howie <cdhowie at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> 2. Make some template-esque tag like {{{noindex}}} that will instruct
> the engine to include the following tag in the <head/> element:

Parser directives like __noindex__ are the mediawiki esq way of
accomplishing things like this. ... but it's all the same..

> P.S. Regarding Gregory's response (that came in while writing this)
> potential abuse is not really a concern.  We have a block button.  The
> trick is coming up with a policy or guideline on usage so people know
> what's acceptable and what's not.

It's not just me pointing this out... proposals like this have been
previously rejected on this basis:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9415
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8068

Blocking is a good tool to stop abuse but it only works once we've
found it. Someone could sneakily create __noindex__ pages, especially
via transcluding no-indexing templates.

Also of relevance to this discussion please see:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11443

> Alternately (thinking while I type here, bear with me) we could have a
> MediaWiki: page listing pages that we don't want indexed.  Possibly
> specifying a template would catch all pages that template is
> transcluded to?  Then it could be protected if it became an issue.

Having to read some enormous page every page-load wouldn't be good. It
would be better to do the right thing on average per-namespace then
use something in the pages to control exceptions.