[WikiEN-l] Searchability of non-mainspace pages

[Chris Howie]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>  Oh, very.
>
>  We need a different question, really. If MediaWiki were deliberately designed to have some namespaces that were for search engines to find, and others not, how should that be set up?
>
>  Something like the article space, Wikipedia: space and some Development: space might do. All discussion namespaces are inherently dodgy. But one more namespace that was non-article, non-policy might do; and one more namespace on the other side, so that AfDs didn't have to be in the Wikipedia: space - now this is sounding more reasonable to me.

I think the closest we're going to get to a good technical solution
would be to have some magic words __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ that will
force indexing on or off for a document.  The default could be set
per-namespace, and I'm assuming we'd want articlespace to be the only
one indexed by default.  Not unlike how tables of contents are
handled: <4 sections and there is no TOC, >=4 and there is before the
first section, but __TOC__ and __NOTOC__ can be used to override this.

And whatever the magic words are, there should be a way to specify in
a template "index what transcludes this, but *don't index this
template*" for things like {{policy}}.
"<includeonly>__INDEX__</includeonly>" would take care of that nicely.
 (This assumes the keywords actually have effect when transcluded,
which IMO they should.)  Same for {{essay}} and the like.  That way
much of the userspace content that people will want to search for will
be in Google.  People would be advised to avoid using __INDEX__ on
their userpage to uphold [[WP:NOTMYSPACE]], or on userfied articles so
substandard articles don't show up in Google, etc.

My $0.02, kind of rambling, but hopefully there's some salvageable
ideas in there...

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers