Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-11515627-20191228040405

I know I'm way late to the party, but I thought I'd throw in my voice of disapproval as well. Chucking content unsavory to web crawlers onto the deep web is bad practice and highly ill-conceived, in my opinion. There are legitimate tools put in place to accomplish this, it's as simple as listing  in   or a   tag.

Wikis are supposed to encourage anonymous editors to create accounts and contribute. I totally get that hiding how the sausage is made provides a more cohesive and less confusing experience, but it's contradictory to the spirit of what a wiki is.

At my wiki, we address this by requiring that every single file uploaded provides a description, the original source, the author/artist, the license, and a category for the image (or other file), neatly presented in a file infobox. The template is even preloaded in the upload form for convenience. .

I understand that not every wiki does or can do this, but to me the aforementioned data should be requisite information that must be provided for a file to be uploaded. I imagine if these requirements were put into place it'd also ensure a certain level of quality of file uploads, instead of the current image spam found on almost every other wiki.

Point is, this kinda sucks for wikis like mine where we put in the work to make file pages presentable and of invaluable utility. In fact, PDF scans are some of our most popular files according to recent analytics, and they're used in citations as sources. Implementing this would be a non-negligible blow to our viewership and resourcefulness, which is frustrating considering there's a way better and more popular alternative solution to the SEO problem.