NYB on The Volokh Conspiracy, Some First Thoughts on Wikipedia Options

[CharlotteWebb]

Ohhhhh, very good! Did you know the actual HTML(?) tag for that, at the time? AFAIK, we didn't discover NOINDEX until some time later. And were astounded at how easy this was, and yet WP still refuses to alter their software to allow it (yes, you can't add {{NOINDEX}} to a mainspace page and have it do anything, even if you want to).

Well, just thinking out loud here. If you tag a bad article with this, then forget about it, you'll be increasing the likelihood that nobody will ever find it and nothing will be done about it.

There may be a way to prevent it from ever appearing as a "random article" either. I'll have to test this on my site.

[One]

Same for I believe in equal treatment for all of Jimbo's arbcom lackeys.

except when you don't.

Since the day Hivemind opened, Brandt has been consistently uneven in the treatment of listing. He has habitually offered to remove people for kissing his ring in various ways. I can't imagine why he thinks it helps his cause. I would have voted to delete his articles without coercion (as indeed I did). I think his critique would be stronger without it; either list everyone or define fixed criteria for removal.

I won't cooperate with anything else.

I could swear there was a proposal to actually do that at some point.
But specifically, I think user ought to be noindex just like user talk.

MBisanz is the guru in this subject. He's made several proposals to improve things. He posted links back in February.

This post has been edited by One: Mon 25th May 2009, 2:58am

[Jon Awbrey]

I won't cooperate with anything else.

And yet you capitulate to coercion, double standards, favoritism, hypocrisy, and inconsistency on a massive scale every day when it comes to Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

[One]

I won't cooperate with anything else.

And yet you capitulate to coercion, double standards, favoritism, hypocrisy, and inconsistency on a massive scale every day when it comes to Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

No, the difference is that I sympathize with Daniel Brandt's position. He would be better off if he stopped offering to add or remove people for favors, so I'm going to do him a favor and ignore it every time he makes me such a proposition.

Brandt: if you think I should list my name, I might have taken the advice. It's a reasonable position. But I'm certainly not going to do it if people believe it's an example of your coercion or my capitulation to your coercion.

Keep me listed. Or don't. But do yourself a favor and stop asking me for Hivemind favors.

[Jon Awbrey]

I won't cooperate with anything else.

And yet you capitulate to coercion, double standards, favoritism, hypocrisy, and inconsistency on a massive scale every day when it comes to Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

No, the difference is that I sympathize with Daniel Brandt's position. He would be better off if he stopped offering to add or remove people for favors, so I'm going to do him a favor and ignore it every time he makes me such a proposition.

Brandt: if you think I should list my name, I might have taken the advice. It's a reasonable position. But I'm certainly not going to do it if people believe it's an example of your coercion or my capitulation to your coercion.

Keep me listed. Or don't. But do yourself a favor and stop asking me for Hivemind favors.

WALOC*

Jon

* What A Load Of Crap

[Lar]

I won't cooperate with anything else.

And yet you capitulate to coercion, double standards, favoritism, hypocrisy, and inconsistency on a massive scale every day when it comes to Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

No, the difference is that I sympathize with Daniel Brandt's position. He would be better off if he stopped offering to add or remove people for favors, so I'm going to do him a favor and ignore it every time he makes me such a proposition.

Brandt: if you think I should list my name, I might have taken the advice. It's a reasonable position. But I'm certainly not going to do it if people believe it's an example of your coercion or my capitulation to your coercion.

Keep me listed. Or don't. But do yourself a favor and stop asking me for Hivemind favors.

WALOC*

Jon

* What A Load Of Crap

YMMV*

Lar

* Your Mileage May Vary

[dtobias]

WALOC*

Jon

* What A Load Of Crap

IKYABWAI*

Dan

* I Know You Are But What Am I?

[Somey]

Ohhhhh, very good! Did you know the actual HTML(?) tag for that, at the time? AFAIK, we didn't discover NOINDEX until some time later. And were astounded at how easy this was, and yet WP still refuses to alter their software to allow it (yes, you can't add {{NOINDEX}} to a mainspace page and have it do anything, even if you want to).

To be fair (not that they deserve fairness under the circumstances), it wasn't quite that simple, originally. The searchbots only care about the URL (i.e., they don't know what a "namespace" is), so in theory the Wikipedia folks could have simply moved any questionable BLP or other article into some sort of "quasi-namespace" and added the quasi-namespace to robots.txt.

IOW, they could have moved "Daniel Brandt" to "BLP/Daniel Brandt," added "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLP/*" to robots.txt as an exception, and that article (and others with "BLP/" in front of their titles) would have been de-indexed. However, that would have broken external links to the article, and since redirects are essentially the same as the target article as far as Google is concerned, they would either have had to accept the breakage of those links (no big deal IMO, if used only in specific cases), or needed some means of preventing the Redirect from working specifically for searchbots. WR's board software can do things like that, but MediaWiki either isn't that sophisticated, or nobody wants to develop/enable an extension to make it that sophisticated.

"NOINDEX" tagging is actually harder to implement, but since theoretically it could be added to any article by any editor (if not disabled by the developers, as they've done), it's a better solution (or would be if it were fully enabled).

Anyway, the reason it's harder is that MediaWiki produces and outputs its HTML page headers before it ever reads, much less parses, the article text in the database. That "noindex" has to be in the headers as a META tag, but "pre-parsing" the article text would add to the processing overhead and affect performance... So, I'd assume (I haven't actually looked, to be honest) that parsing for the __NOINDEX__ "magic word" takes place at the point of storing the text - i.e., "post-parsing" - and the presence of the magic word sets a flag in a separate field, which wouldn't have to be parsed.

One of these days I'll take a look at it and see how they actually did that. Regardless though, a really good MediaWiki developer shouldn't have needed more than a couple of days to figure out the technical aspects - a couple of hours, more likely. Certainly not two years, in any event - the fact is, they just didn't want to do it, and wouldn't have if people like Newyorkbrad hadn't gotten behind the idea. Which is why I believe Mr. Brad should be highly commended for taking a stand on it.

[sbrown]

No, the difference is that I sympathize with Daniel Brandt's position. He would be better off if he stopped offering to add or remove people for favors, so I'm going to do him a favor and ignore it every time he makes me such a proposition.

Brandt: if you think I should list my name, I might have taken the advice. It's a reasonable position. But I'm certainly not going to do it if people believe it's an example of your coercion or my capitulation to your coercion.

Keep me listed. Or don't. But do yourself a favor and stop asking me for Hivemind favors.

Im sure we all admire Ones firm and principalled stand. The question is this. Daniel if I mistake not has several important wikidiots in fear of his list who run to do his biding when he snaps his fingers. Can he get more power by removing the fear? Of course not. Does he like his power? You tell me. So One is wasting his time telling Daniel to stop. But I say more strength to Daniel. Wikidiots need someone to fear!

[Jon Awbrey]

I'm sure we all admire Ones firm and principaled stand. The question is this. Daniel if I mistake not has several important wikidiots in fear of his list who run to do his biding when he snaps his fingers. Can he get more power by removing the fear? Of course not. Does he like his power? You tell me. So One is wasting his time telling Daniel to stop. But I say more strength to Daniel. Wikidiots need someone to fear!

Yes, he has all the firm principals of Sgt. Schultz. But Prisoners Of Wikipedia are not required to play by Col. Klink's rules.

Ja Ja

[MBisanz]

MBisanz is the guru in this subject. He's made several proposals to improve things. He posted links back in February.

Which is also why I created Wikipedia:NOINDEX as a page to disambiguate the various efforts, but sadly that page has gone unloved.

[Milton Roe]

MBisanz is the guru in this subject. He's made several proposals to improve things. He posted links back in February.

Which is also why I created Wikipedia:NOINDEX as a page to disambiguate the various efforts, but sadly that page has gone unloved.

Not surprisingly. Inasmuch as Google is the motor that drives much of the evil that WP does in the world, just a simple judicious use of NOINDEX, as a sort of clutch which would decouple WP from Google at key places, could go a long way towards carving out the evil and leaving the rest of the heap as its own unique mix of (more or less) harmless garage-sale trash, trivia, junk, and excellence.

Example: you could NOINDEX all BLPs, even dead-tree famous BLPs and non-controversial BLPs. Then, when the subject died, you'd simply remove the tag. How easy is that? Not a total solution, but (like many other things) a step in the right direction.

Bur we can't have that, now, can we? Anything that simple would be fought tooth and nail as something which would make the game too transparent.

Another use: suppose you get tired of Wikipedia acting like WikiNews and getting the wrong perspective on history by breathlessly modifying articles on events as they happen. Okay, you can unplug some of this by simply NOINDEXing articles on in-the-news events (some Middle East uproar) for a couple of months.

The same for articles on political elections. NOINDEX them until the day after the election is over, and you remove all the political spin-doctor motivation and return them to encyclopedia-land, where they belong. Nothing in Wikipedia about Sarah Palin shows up until Nov. 5, 2008. Think of the work saved, due to the motivation being unplugged.

So you could still write about anything that goes on in the Bush or Obama administration, but Google doesn't pick it up till the administration is done, and the NOINDEX tags are removed. If you see an edit war starting to brew over some nationistic bit of nonsense which is ongoing, NOINDEX it until it dies down. Do that ON TOP of all the other usual measures.

Yeah, I know-- you'd have to change that paragraph in the WP front page, crowing about itself as a news source. And you might have to take Wikinews seriously. But do you want a semi-encyclopedia, or not?