Last modified: 2013-06-18 23:14:20 UTC
Splitting this out from bug 48856. When a user visits (for example) <http://en.zero.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Spears> and they're not part of the "Zero network", they're presented with a large red banner. We need to re-evaluate whether this behavior is correct. Ideally, a user trying to visit our sites/content will be directed there. It's unclear why Zero is restricted to particular IP addresses/ranges (there may be a legal reason for this). It's also unclear whether the current behavior is ideal. Showing a big red banner is less helpful than, say, auto-redirecting the user to <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Spears>. It looks like the current red banner provides a link to <http://en.m.wikipedia.org>, but not to the specific article the user was trying to access. It may defy user expectations to auto-redirect, but providing a more direct link may be a good idea. This needs more thought.
*** Bug 48855 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
We will be setting up a no-index rule for zero.wikipedia.org pages. The business team confirmed that zero.wikipedia.org pages were never intended to be in Google's index to begin with.
<cross-posted> Update: We've added an enhancement to Wikipedia Zero so that if a user who isn't on a participating carrier network navigates to a Wikipedia Zero page on <language>.zero.wikipedia.org, such as http://en.zero.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_%28band%29 , the user will be presented an option to visit the canonical URL of the article. If clicked, the canonical URL should get the user to the mobile or desktop version of the page, based on device type. We're hoping that by next week the Google index will be refreshed so as to correctly mark the <language>.zero.wikipedia.org pages as duplicate pages in the omitted section. Upon confirmation of as much, the current plan is to introduce https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/69420/ to prevent indexing of <language>.zero.wikipedia.org altogether. The indexing is being treated on a separate bug, bug 48856.
