Stuck with hundreds of skeleton articles. How to avoid and resolve?

[pegasus]

The existing way to manage your problem is to invoke VaultWiki templates and to show/hide the parts of the templates based on how they are filled in.

Conditional processing is only available within a VaultWiki-template context.

The additional tools that I mentioned being in the pipeline as new features, which might have also been helpful, such as an option for creating new pages from form-based templates (rather than copy-pasting the template invocation), are still intended to be improvements upon the existing VaultWiki-template system.

The drawback to using VaultWiki-templates is that H tags (sections/chapters) cannot be individually edited if the H tag was invoked within a template. However, if you believe that losing the ability to edit individual paragraphs is an acceptable trade-off for limiting your "skeleton" problem, then I encourage you to try VaultWiki-templates before you have too many more pages to convert.

You can start by converting two or three existing articles to see if it works well for you, and if so, update your site's copy-paste tutorials to just have the template invocations. I say to try it first, because I do not know whether IF conditions will function correctly in your version.

[Alfa1]

I will await the new features, as I dont think that the current VaultWiki Template functionality is a solution to my problems.

[Alfa1]

Google seems to be penalizing for such pages, as searches that include such low quality wiki pages will not come up in google. Yet, other searches for my site content is always top ranking.

[pegasus]

So in other words, you have not seen that your site is being penalized overall, just that the low-quality pages are not ranking well. I'm not sure you would want low-quality pages to rank well, or at all. That's why I suggested this earlier in the thread:

Other future methods that I see for combating this are also response measures:
- When more page settings are added, have a setting for whether a page should be indexed by Google. If a page is especially poor, you can mitigate your bounces by removing it from search results.
- When flags are added, we can have a setting where if a page has certain flags (like "Stub"/"Skeleton"/etc), then it is not indexed by Google.

[Alfa1]

No, I think the solution you are suggesting may be a good patch. But what I am saying is something different:
A search on google for a term will yield a number of pages from my site.
If one of these pages is a wiki with lots of text code, then google will not show any of the pages. Even though the quality of other pages is good.

[pegasus]

I will attempt to add page-level toggle for search indexing for the next release. Maybe once low-quality pages are excluded from your index, your high-quality pages will begin appearing again.

[Alfa1]

Maybe allow users to add a 'stub' or 'empty page' status to pages. And automatically add no-index to such pages.

Related suggestion: https://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/3508/
If all members and guests would be able to rate articles as 'empty page' then all my wiki articles would have the correct status in no time and empty articles would get no-index fast.
A very basic drop down select at the bottom of the article would be really great.