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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 3:06 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> Transparency.  There is no benefit and a great drawback to not  indexing.
> Not indexing makes it appear we are hiding something.  That  belief is already
> very prevalent among our critics, we don't want to feed them a  ton of raw
> steak.

You are welcome to weigh the benefit as insufficient,  when you say
"no benefit" you're insulting several experienced and trusted users
here who see substantial benefit.

I've yet to see anyone accuse us of hiding things on the basis of the
many things we already no-index. Can you provide a pointer?    On the
flipside I can point to several examples of WP critics complaining
that our sausage-making is showing up at the top of Google, above more
useful links, just on the basis of our domain's high position.

If your concern is transparency and avoiding criticism for hiding
things there are several gigantic elephants in the room that are not
yet addressed which make no-indexing seem utterly insignificant by
comparison.  For example, consider the fact that deletion and
oversight cause mis-attribution of edits, and that we frequently use
deletion to hide widely linked to bad edits ... really to avoid people
being mislead by the links, but someone could argue that we're hiding
our errors).