It appears that search engines are indexing demoted articles. For example, I searched for a scam phone number on Bing, and I saw that a wikiHow article came up as the first result in search. Here is the search
. And here is a picture (It is the first result):
Note: DO NOT CALL THIS NUMBER! It is a scam.
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Google is also indexing the article, as well as Special:NewPages
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They’re in Quality Review, and you have to be logged in, so most people won’t see the page.
I’ve encountered the same issue - before I expanded Identify a Potcake Dog
to be promoted, I came across it in Google search results (as a demoted and NFD’d article). I informed Jayne when it happened then, so I believe it is likely being looked into. For now, logged out readers can’t read the content, so hopefully it’ll be alright.
The article can still be viewed by logged out readers if you look at the cached version
.
Hmm… Then all I can say is hopefully no one’s deliberately looking for those pages.
JayneG
7
Yeah, we’ve had a few instances of this, Alex also found one recently. Because they never should have been indexed, this is a curious situation. I’ll update the team with this info. Thanks for reporting @R2_d2000
.
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The effective solution would be to probably use __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__, two keywords built into every installation of MediaWiki, but I do not know how these keywords work on this highly-customized site. So I don’t know.
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JayneG
9
We have a call for help!
Reuben is working really hard to figure out the cause of this problem, but every time we find an article for him to look into, the article ends up being deleted before he can figure it out!
How you can help:
We’d love for anyone to help by checking on Special:NewPages
to find new articles by authors who aren’t known around wikiHow, and simply search for them on Google to see if you can find them indexed. Then if you find one, just post it here and I can pass it on to Reuben.
Anyone keen to help out?
Tagging those that have been involved with this issue so far just in case (but anyone is welcome!) @R2_d2000
, @HelperOnWikihow
, @Awesome_Aasim
, @anon74718567
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JayneG
11
Amazing, thanks for your quick action @R2_d2000
. I’ve given Reuben a link to this thread so he can also keep on top of updates!
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Maybe Google is coming across these articles through a MediaWiki RSS feed.
But then, new Wikipedia articles, which are also supposed to be deindexed, are not showing up on Bing.
This is bad. I think for some time we should enable this (partially redundant) feature in MediaWiki where pages need to be marked as “patrolled” before they are indexed then have New Article Boost also automatically park these pages as patrolled.
If needbe, we can just lock the entire wiki down until this problem is fixed. Not like we as a community want to, but guarding quality and making sure spam does not show up on Google and Bing is our first priority.
Aasim, let the engineers figure this one out - you don’t know how the site operates on the backend or what’s causing the bug. You’re going from 0-100 on suggestions lately and it’s a little extreme. There’s no need to lock down the wiki and without clear understanding of what’s causing this, doing that could result in no article creation for weeks.
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@JayneG
I found one in NAB from an anonymous author - Set Up an Anole’s Home
( Google
). I’ll update if I find more.
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The NewPages list might not be the best place to send users to help out. You might want to send them to the NAB log
and have them look for “demoted” in the summary of each title. @JayneG
By the way: Looking through some of the results from other people listing stuff later in this discussion, I found several that I was the demoter of in NAB. However, not all of them can I put my signature on.
Not all of the articles picked up are truly demoted - I discovered the bug by trying to plagiarism-check an article that hadn’t been boosted yet and seeing it pop up in the Google results. It basically just needs to be at a point where a logged-out reader shouldn’t be seeing it.
JayneG
18
The good news is that with your help Reuben seems to have figured out the issue and he’s been able to put a fix in place.
It may take some time for those that were already available in Google search to be removed, but if anyone has a moment to check any new articles (made last night/today) to see that they’re not coming up in Google searches, I’m sure that’d be appreciated.
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