Wikipedia talk:Courtesy blanking

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The discussion for this started 2006-01-17 on the wikien-l mailing list. Please see [1]. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-11-27 20:50Z

A change was made to robots.txt on 2006-01-28 to prevent search engines from indexing AfD's, see [2]. --Interiot 22:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Note that the robots.txt regular expression doesn't prevent indexing of transclusions such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Sports, nor via mirrors that don't properly mirror robots.txt. Perhaps these pages should use <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-12-18 23:16Z

[edit] Protect pages?

Would it make sense to protect these pages then? If the front page is to be blanked, it does not make sense that it needs to be continually monitored for non-blanking. --HappyCamper 20:28, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

In most cases, we don't protect pages until it has become clear that inappropriate editing is likely to continue. That usually means that something has had to be reverted several times in a relatively short period. -- Donald Albury 03:32, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that is true, but why leave the page for "babysitting" then? --HappyCamper 03:16, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is built on the principal that anyone can edit any page. Page protection is a last ditch, temporary solution for all pages, justified only by levels of vandalism that make it very difficult to edit and maintain a page. -- Donald Albury 03:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I am not thinking of vandalism specifically. But this is a measure that is rarely used. That is a different matter. I would be the sort that would not rule out this option. Protect if necessary, but not necessarily. --HappyCamper 03:51, 21 January 2007 (UTC)