[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Google, Wikipedia and internall affairs

[The Cunctator]

On Mon, 2002-12-16 at 06:38, giskart wrote:
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> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have noticed that google also have in his index the "talk:something" namespace and "user:something", "User talk:something" on the English and the Dutch wikipedia. The others i do not know.
> 
> And it also haves in his index the MetaWikipedia.
> 
> I find that google should not index our internall affairs. Only the aricles, nothing else.  And that the MetaWikipedia is not especialy for the general public. I should also not be in the index of google.
> 
> Am I alone about this ?

The meta and talk pages should certainly be indexed. It's important for
Wikipedia that the process of Wikipedia be
indexed/public/searchable/accessible. The "edit" pages and automatically
generated pages don't need to be indexed.

If a Talk page competes with the article that's not a problem with
google--that points to a deficiency in the article. Or perhaps the talk
page has more interesting content. That's often the case.