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

[Risker]

2008/7/23 <WJhonson at aol.com>:

> Killing a mosquito with a hammer is not the proper approach however.
>
> Most of, if not all the major issues NYB brought up, were addressed
>  already.
>

User and user talk pages, DRV and others have not been addressed. It is time
to close the loop.


> <snip>
> Often I simply know that there is some issue with a certain user, and I
>  want
> to know what it IS, since some nellies on here won't just come right out
>  and
> say it directly (read that tongue-in-cheek).  My sole recourse is to
>  Google
> for the user.  Many, but not all, of these hits are to internal  Wikipedia
> pages.  How can a historian accurately track the meta-project if  we're
> going to
> suppress the very pages that are most needed?
>

Google for the user?  Really?  You can't find talk pages or user
contribution histories with out Google?

Meta-project pages are all still there within the mediawiki search function.
Unlike some people who seem to need google to find anything for them, I have
never once had a problem finding the desired page using the in-house search
engine, wonky as it is, and it keeps improving over time.


>
> The only thing that noindexing User and User Talk pages will do, is give
> ammunition to those who already loudly trumpet that we hide actions of
> malevolent editors.. admins.. bureaucrats.. and arbcom members.   Because
> now, we've
> made it 20 times harder to actually track those  actions.
>

You haven't been paying attention. There are all kinds of BLP violations on
user and user talk pages, the vast majority of them  unrecognised and
unaddressed.  Those pages often turn up in top 10 google hits, and often
perpetuate the BLP problems that may have assiduously been removed from
articles and even article talk. Articles need to be indexed. Community
gossip does not.

The encyclopedia is about articles. That is what our readership wants to
have at their fingertips. I doubt in the extreme that 99.998% of the people
who have accessed Wikipedia in the past 24 hours care even so much as one
tidbit who our admins are, or what our dispute resolution system is, or
whether I exchanged greetings with anyone on my userpage. But I am sure that
there are plenty of non-Wikipedians who are flabbergasted to google
themselves and find nasty things written about themselves on a wikipedia
page that doesn't even look like an article.

This is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.

Risker