Problem: We've got a serious problem on Wikipedia as a whole. When people try to search for terms in Spanish online, a surprising percentage of the time the response that Google comes up with is actually from the Asturian Wikipedia. Screenshot of Google results in Spanish What's the issue? Well, Asturian is spoken by less than a million people. Certainly, it's a real language and deserves a real Wikipedia, and its users work hard and should be praised. But it is a useful resource for, at most, less than a million people.
Spanish, however, is spoken by half a billion people as a native language. When someone searches for a term like "donde viven las cobras", the language that they are overwhelmingly likely to expect is Spanish, not Asturian.
Yet Google consistently returns Asturian Wikipedia over the Spanish Wikipedia for Google searches, at least those emanating from the United States (the second-biggest Spanish speaking country there is!). I personally find that about 30% of my Spanish google searches lead to the Asturian Wikipedia being the one chosen by Google as the top Wiki link, and this then blocks the Spanish one from appearing at all.
This is not just a Google issue, actually. Bing does the same!
Proposed solution: Intentionally reduce the SEO/web presence of the Asturian Wikipedia, making it less likely to pop up.
Who would benefit: All Spanish speakers worldwide, who would be far more likely to encounter the language they are looking for. (It's worth noting that even most Asturian speakers also speak Spanish.) It also provides some form of social justice, since Spanish speakers are much more likely to be of a lower economic status than Asturian speakers.
More comments: Frequently, links to the Spanish Wikipedia won't even come up when Spanish terms are searched in the USA (which has more Spanish speakers than any other country in the world bar one); instead, you'll get a link to the Asturian wiki and then the English one, even when you're searching in Spanish.
Hello there @Red Slash, we met as a team to discuss this proposal and we had a few questions-- do you know of any other users experiencing this? If so, can you link us to those conversations so that we can understand this? We tried to recreate the search you mentioned in your problem description but were unable to see any Asturian results. If the wish is about changing the way that an external engine structures the data that would be out of scope for us. This Robots.txt file may be of interest to you as it is the Spanish Wikipedia's disallow list which tells SEOs what to omit from searches. Thanks in advance NRodriguez (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, sorry for my lack of response--I don't normally check on meta. I have had this issue continuously for a couple of years, but I haven't had any conversations with anyone else.
I'm wondering if we can enforce a disallow list throughout the Asturian Wikipedia to reduce its web presence for any article that shares a title with the Spanish article for the same thing. Red Slash (talk) 19:05, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Proposer did not respond
