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Exclusions

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  • To a large extent, Wikipedia can control which namespaces, and indeed which pages, Google will index. Google and most if not all major search engines comply with the Robots exclusion standard. While nothing compels them to continue to comply, the widespread adherence to this standard strongly suggest that all major search engines, and most if not all non-malicious crawlers will continue to comply.
Currently the Draft: and User: namespaces, and their talk spaces, are not indexed by compliant engines such as Google. The Wikipedia space, and of course the main article space, is indexed. I don't know what the current settings are for any other spaces, but they are technically easy to change. DES (talk) 22:49, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The statement is made below that certain bad drafts should be killed with fire. Non-compliant search engines (that won't follow robot exclusion) should be killed with fire. If they go into user space and user talk space, they are opening people's drawers to look at their drawers. (The one time that I remember that a politician was caught with $78,700 in her drawers, the wiretap was reason to strip-search her.) Robert McClenon (talk) 20:38, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
To the best of my knowledge, no significant search engine is currently non-compliant with the Robots Exclusion Standard, Robert McClenon. Am I mistaken? Are there particular ones that you are aware of? DES (talk) 22:42, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Good. I see no good business reason why a search engine would want to look in the drawers of Wikipedia editors to see if their drawers are clean. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:00, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Distinction exists but is blurry in some ways

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Some of the content policies and other guidance intended for mainspace actually has been extended to all namespaces, including WP:OFFICE policies like WP:COPYVIO, and WP:BLP. Other principles like WP:NOTHERE, WP:CONSENSUS, and WP:POLEMIC have been used at MfD to not just userspace junk essays out of WP namespace, but outright delete them if they're egregious enough. That said, I'm one of most frequent "reminderizers" that WP:CCPOL (WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, and WP:V + WP:RS as V's supplement) does not apply to things like guidelines, talk page discussions, and policies themselves. No external sources can tell Wikipedia what orders to put page-bottom sections in, what it's criteria for speedy deletion must be, or what rules to have about inter-editor conflict resolution. Every extended discussion we engage in trying to figure out what an article should say based on the available sources so far is original research (quite literally – it is all four of WP:AEIS in most cases, but of the sources and their reliability, and of the encyclopedic relevance of particular facts, not of the truth of them, which is what the sources provide a model of for us).

However, CCPOL does apply to any template that may be used in mainspace. It also applies in limited but often page-fatal ways to userspaced drafts of wikiprojects, as another example. I guarantee you that if I create User:SMcCandlish/drafts/WikiProject Justice for the Armenian Genocide (or any of a zillion other WP:ADVOCACY / WP:TRUTH / WP:GREATWRONGS / WP:SOAPBOX / WP:BATTLEGROUND examples one could come up with) that this page will be deleted. Just search WP:MFD's archives for deleted bogus wikiprojects and you'll see that this is so. Same goes for deleted userspace rant "essays".  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:54, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for these comments. I will review the essay against your comments. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:43, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

At least 4 different concerns (from vital to bogus) about userspace article drafts

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When it comes to userspace drafts of articles, the two principal concerns I see being raised most often are:

  1. "This does not mean well, and is full of lies/CoI/PoV/nonsense/WP:NOT and clearly being drafted in a way that it would be nuked immediately if put into mainspace."
  2. "This maybe means well, but is full of policy violations that are not limited to just being mainspace rules [copyright, BLP violations, etc.]."
  3. "This clearly meant well, but the author hasn't been active in 5 years."
  4. "This clearly means well, but the still-active author hasn't touched it in 5 years."

These are all totally different issues, with different validity levels.

The first is an obvious "kill it with fire" problem. These pages should simply be deleted per the WP:TNT principle. It's less work to just write a proper article from scratch than to repair a blatant propaganda or attack piece.

The second is a serious but very temporary problem. It can be rectified by simply removing the offending material and leaving the rest alone.

The third is a semi-problem: The pages will probably remain abandoned, yet may contain work worth salvaging and making public; we probably need a better mechanism for doing this, including "auto-usurping" long-missing editors' drafts and moving them into whatever that process is.

The last one is not a problem at all. I would be apoplectic if anyone tried to delete several of my more developed userspace drafts. They are works in progress, albeit slow progress, and as I get access to different journal searches and stuff through WP:TWL I check them, maybe every year or three, for newly available material. They cause no harm, anyone may beat me to writing a public article on those topics, and anyone can even use what I've written so far to go live with an improved version (though it would be rude to do so without involving me if I'm still active, I would say). A few are also AfD-rescued stubs on things that may prove to be notable, or seemed like something likely to be notable after a few years, and it's utilitiarian to have a stub about them in my userspace as a reminder to check every year or so for new sources (or evidence of irrelevance after all).

Thank you for the answers to my questions about problems with drafts. I agree with a few very minor differences not worth arguing about. Things that fall within point 1 may qualify for speedy deletion, such as lies, blatant spam, attacks, etc., and, if not, they are obvious cases for MFD. Things that fall within point 2 should either have the offending material deleted or in some cases should be MFD'd. I agree that point 4 is not a reason for deletion, and I think that point 3 is not a reason for deletion either. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:55, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I would add that there is another case to be addressed, and that is AFC drafts that are being repeatedly resubmitted with no evidence of improvement, because the author is tendentious and won't take advice, or because the author is being a pest, or some similar reason, and that MFD works reasonably well for these. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:55, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I still have a question. There is considerable argument at this time about whether MFD is broken or needs to be fixed somehow. I don't understand what the underlying issue is, because I think that MFD works reasonably well and doesn't need fixing. There appear to be either editors who are panicking about the need to get rid of drafts or are panicking about the evil of getting rid of drafts; I am not sure which. Can someone explain what the issue is? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:55, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Stale userspace drafts has existed for years and got up to 47k pages. Someone asked about it, I helped organize a drive of just listing every page there at Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts/Stale drafts. People started with low-hanging fruit like pages largely blank (technically using the default Article Wizard text), taking those to MFD. That was opposed, but deleted, taken to DRV where it was again opposed but eventually deleted, I got a new G6 criteria, which was again opposed but eventually passed, to kill those pages and that eliminated probably 15k pages I'd guess. From there, there's hundreds of pages that are "userification"s following deletion (either authorized or not), tons and tons of duplications of mainspace pages and plenty of just nonsense drafts or testing. It's pretty easy to come in screaming that deleting a single page will drive editors away since there's literally no way to prove that wrong so that's what's going on at MFD. My issue is that we have G13 so no one gives a rat's ass about deleting page today that were created six months but heaven forbid we delete a page created in 2006 which was the editor's only contribution. There was an extensively multiple-page long argument about whether a person who hadn't edited since 2005 could return because they didn't have a "retired" tag on their user page. Of course, all of this is complete nonsense since pretty much every single page being deleted would be restored in an instant at WP:REFUND or just by asking around. No one actually cares that much about it but it's a great way to cry about how "deletionists have destroyed the encyclopedia" with tales of people who wrote something a decade ago getting it deleted and how they were so horrified that they were never return. It's drama mongering to me. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:26, 19 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Meanwhile, personally I've found about ten good drafts that I've taken to mainspace, about a dozen or two workable drafts taken to draftspace and other usable work. If the solution is to not delete anything in fear of antagonizing people and to keep those pages basically hidden away in odd userspaces, it's harder for people who want to work on drafts to do that. The goal isn't to make it so I can browse userspace and see nothing there, it's just we should consider cleaning out the pages that were created prior to G13 when we didn't have a system to delete these old drafts. We have one now, there's stuff that pre-dated one, it would be nice to clear it out in the same way we let AFC have some ability to function by deleting stuff. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:37, 19 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Copyediting of the essay

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As for more general feedback on the essay, it needs a lot of copyediting, as some sentences have redundancies, unclear wording, etc., and it uses a lot of WP jargon without linking to much of any of it, and some idiosyncratic terminology that doesn't match the usual lingo, like calling namespaces just "spaces".

It also has a too-dense look, but I'm the last person to help fix that, since I "write long" in such things. I think that if, after the intro, it had a bullet-list of key points, that would be a major aid to clarity, and make it more digestible. I need to rewrite some of my own essays that way, and slash a few others by 50% or more. It's always easier to see what to cut in someone else's writing that one's own. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:54, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:45, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 32 § Better designating the reader-facing and editor-facing areas of Wikipedia

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 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 32 § Better designating the reader-facing and editor-facing areas of Wikipedia. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:46, 20 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's been archived, but I just came across this essay, so wanted to link it for historical use. There was a good discussion, although there needs to be a lot more to truly get at the problem. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:47, 20 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Title change?

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Hi Robert McClenon, I just discovered this essay. I haven't read it all yet, so my comments here may be redundant, but here goes. I wonder if a title change might be in order? Here are two options, starting with this thread title, but reversed to keep the same order as your current title (Inside-facing and outside-facing):

  1. editor-facing and reader-facing
  2. inward-facing and outward-facing

They mean the same thing as your current title, but they are also options. What do you think? I think of the articles as the encyclopedia, and everything else (all talk pages, PAG, essays, and all userspace) as the behind-the-scenes editorial functions, which are not part of the encyclopedia and not governed by all the PAG (except for a few like BLP, ADVOCACY, NOTFORUM, etc.). -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 19:06, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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