On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Chris Howie
<cdhowie(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
People do sneaky mainspace vandalism too.
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.
That is how I meant it -- a page of exceptions. In the case of
categories, it could point at just a template we put on
non-encyclopedic categories, if "noindex-by-transclusion" can work.
--
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers