2002-08-04: Updated the Wiki source, it's now much much faster, and cleaner. Beware of bugs.

I'm wondering if the page not found errors should be actual 404's. What's happening at the moment is that google caches them (because they're not 404) and ranks them higher because the target word is in the URL for that page.

The page that actually mentions the word and isn't blank is likely to be the one with useful information on it, but google has a habit of hiding 'similar' pages from the same site so it might not even appear in the search results.

Does that make any sense? -- zcat(1)

The wiki is really no good at all if I can't go CreatingRandomLinks?; if it were to lead to a 404 when I clicked on them, then you'd never create any pages because it would be altogether too tricky to do so from whatever your browser/cache shows for a 404.

The alternative I guess is to check your useragent on a page that doesn't exist and give a 404 if you claim to be Googlebot? -- CraigBox

Just because it's tagged as 404 doesn't mean it can't still contain an EDIT button too; most of the time the browser shows whatever 404 page the webserver chooses to return. We'd return exactly the same page as we currently do, just mark it as being technically a '404' so places like google don't cache/index/rank it until after it contains UsefulInformation?.

Or do a 404 redirect straight into the edit page (which google doesn't cache)

Besides, the point was that people will find the original referring page. You still have the little "?" button on the referring link which goes straight into editing. As soon an someone edits it it's no longer 404.

I know we want to encourage people to add UsefulInformation? as often as possible; but we also don't want to distract them away from whatever UsefulInformation? we already have.

How about changing the script so that the URL will not contain the actual word? I.e. use rot13 or whatever to make it stand out less. (%50%65%72%63%65%6E%74-encoding the word comes to mind as a less 31337 alternative.) -- EraEriksson?

That's possibly the worse non-solution anyone could have thought of. - zcat(1)