Last modified: 2012-12-21 18:33:37 UTC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houla_massacre has a source tag of <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />. I'm fairly sure this shouldn't be there! There doesn't seem to be anything in the page code causing this - there's no __NOINDEX__, and it's not in the tracker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Noindexed_pages The current page isn't cached from an older version, either, as far as I can see.
After a bit of digging, it looks like new articles are actively noindexed until patrolled through newpages. I tested this with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BAlio_Campos - noindexed, then patrolled, and the noindex tag vanished. Houla doesn't seem to have been patrolled (there's no entry in the page log for it) but it's also not patrollable. I can't find it in Special:Newpages, either browsing by date or searching by the author who created it: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ANewPages&namespace=all&tagfilter=&username=Goltak&hideredirs= This may be a result of pagemoves or deletions (it's been moved away from the original title and back again, with a couple of deleted edits as a result), but it's a bit of a problem - there doesn't seem to be any way to "rescue" the page!
Definitely seems to be missing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewPages&dir=prev&offset=20120526081700&limit=5 (using timestamp from article's first undeleted rev rounded to nearest minute)
We fixed the noindexing on this article by patrolling it from Special:NewPagesFeed. It's very strange the somehow the article isn't patrollable from Special:NewPages (which means that it isn't in the recentchanges table). This will require further investigation.
It looks like if an article is deleted and undeleted it won't show up in Special:NewPages.
Is there a bug about unpatrolled new pages being noindexed? It looks completely crazy and not what intended (doesn't happen on other wikis), or is it only for en.wiki where both things are normal? :-)
It's a deliberate feature on enwiki, though it doesn't seem to be well-documented - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/NOINDEX
