While the future isn't yet known, at present internal search is only accessible as a specialist "wikipedia search engine". For better or worse it's like any forum search; in that there is no major external interface and it has not become widely relied on like google or similar as a routine port of call for anyone seeking in-depth information on a person (the main reason for NOINDEXing of pages). An employer for example is far more likely to use google or yahoo, than wikipedia internal search, partly because of prominence, familiarity, lack of awareness, and because most people checking if someone's "known" online don't exhaustively search every place they might have an account -- they google them or look on major social networking sites. Wikipedia is big, but it's no more a routine "major social networking site" than many others. In that context myspace, facebook, blogs, spidered news media, and personal web pages are far better known and used. Should that change and Wikipedia become a prominent "first place to search for non-notable people one knows or might be interested in who might have a real-name mention on there as an account owner" (not that likely) then at that point NOINDEX might conceivably switch to signify "don't return this in an internal search if the user isn't approved/is unconfirmed/isn't an admin, or whatever it at that point. Or there might be a list of "terms not to return on NOINDEXed user and project pages" that would mean someone searching for an incident as an incident might find a page but someone entering a real name as a search term would not. But that's not presently on the horizons. Some thoughts. FT2 On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 8:08 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: on deep an your http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222377105x1201454426/aol?redir=htt… _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

When recruiting for youth groups, I remember being told very explicitly to avoid speaking negatively about competing groups during presentations, given the risk that potential members (or their parents) would find the attitude off-putting. I think a similar concept might apply to encyclopedias -- as a reader, I'm in it for the entries, not the chest pounding. I think we'd do well to bear that in mind, when it comes to public image and especially with regard to the presentation of content.