Help:Water Cooler (policy)

Water Cooler

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Water Cooler Policy Discussion   post
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Legal notes

Note that persons within Directory listings using infobox_person should provide contact & reference information. That because even if they're dead, by definition, if they're within the Directory namespace, that means they have commercial value; ergo there should be contact info + reference information.

For example, Carl Sagan has a link to his estate that generates licensing revenue from his name/works/image. OTOH, Newton is public domain, so he shouldn't be listed under Directory - rather, he should be included within Main page articles.

I guess we (interested?) could create another infobox_person for Main page entries - ie no longer any commercial rights. There's a lot of stuff in infobox_person that could be cleaned up/removed to create a new version for non-commercial public figures. Centiare 12:30, 3 December 2006 (PST)

Spiders don't like stubs

I have been reading a number of Google policy pages and various SEO blog posts, and they all seem to agree on something: Spider/bot readers that index web sites will deprecate the entire site if they find a lot of "empty" pages, pages with very little information, pages with substantially similar content, and pages with no outbound links. It's been a common habit here on Centiare to plug in short stubs that might only mirror the title of the article, as in the cases of March 9 and February 11. Apparently, for search engine optimization, we're not doing ourselves any favors by doing this sort of thing with red-linked pages. It is so much better (I gather) if we take the time to make pages more like March 10. So, may I call for two things from readers of this posting?

1. Stop it. Refrain from making pithy little stubs when you find yourself making a wiki-linked page.
2. Fix it. Hit "Random article" in the left sidebar 10 times, and when an "empty" page comes up (usually, they are Main Space pages), add some meaningful content to it. Wikipedia is fair game to copy, because our Main Space is also released under GFDL.

Thanks for considering this! --MyWikiBiz 15:13, 12 March 2007 (PDT)

I concur, MediaWiki made this page special for a reason. A red link or no link is better than a dead-end link.--OmniMediaGroup 16:59, 12 March 2007 (PDT)

I'm wondering if we should add date tags within articles that reference dates and then run ASK queries from the date entry side. Most of the pages displayed in the dead-end report have links to them; it's the outbound links that are missing. Rather than manually create links back out, ASK is great for automating this task if the respective inbound pages have been appropriately tagged. Snerfling 17:24, 12 March 2007 (PDT)

Date listings like December 20 are hard-coded, so it's a real problem trying to add tags at the report level. That is, each of the events, and person births & deaths should have respective date tags at the source level.

Then, one could merely run an ASK by year to get detailed days, or run an ASK by day to get the respective years. This would solve a lot of dead end page problems, and begin to address some of the WP hard-coding problems. I'm wondering if a bot could be written to automate this task, or outsource it to India. (Or just leave it alone for now.) Snerfling 17:42, 12 March 2007 (PDT)