Currently, user pages on Wikidata are indexed by robots, therefore they appear on search engines. (this can be seen on the page information).
Usually on the Wikimedia projects, the user pages are not indexed for privacy reasons.
Is it possible to disable this feature on Wikidata?
Any other comments pro/con disabling the indexing?
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Set $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies for wikidata | operations/mediawiki-config | master | +4 -0 |
It is possible to do this, even without adjusting code. It's just adding some rule to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Robots.txt. Only community consensus is required.
As told before, there needs to be community decision. This is possible by adding a single line to wiki configuration.
Change 393845 had a related patch set uploaded (by Framawiki; owner: Framawiki):
[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Set $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies for wikidata
@Sjoerddebruin @Urbanecm Good point :) I let a message on Project Chat, I think it's enough for a first overview. If there are a lot of discussions and different points of view then we can move to a RC.
The "Usually on the Wikimedia projects, the user pages are not indexed for privacy reasons." seems to have misled a lot of people to support this. Please provide sourcing for that.
enwiki recently introduced userspace noindexing, but it was not for privacy reasons. I am not aware of many other projects which do this, a dip sample of some major (commons and itwiki) and some minor (dewiktionary, dewikiquote) projects indicates that some do index userspace and others (dewiki, eswiki) don't.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2017/12#Decision:_disable_indexing_of_the_userpages_of_Wikidata_by_robots is archived, I think we can move on.
Change 393845 merged by jenkins-bot:
[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Set $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies for wikidata
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2017-12-14T19:29:07Z] <thcipriani@tin> Synchronized wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php: SWAT: [[gerrit:393845|Set $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies for wikidata]] T181525 (duration: 01m 04s)
Deployed on wikidata.
Note that, per discussions about this change, it can be great to see if it's possible to set this config as default for all wikis. If someone wants to start a discussion on meta...