Delete Abandoned Home Pages
Delete Abandoned Home PagesSomewhere in here we should have a line about deleting long-abandoned home pages with no backlinks. And where are we supposed to put the content temporarily when we do so? I forgot. -- FrancisHwang
You probably mean RecycledHomePages?, but I don't know if the idea will (or should) catch on.
I agree that a home page that says no more than "gee this really works" isn't really a home page and is a candidate for deletion. However, if there is even just enough information to consider saving it here then I would suggest leaving the page in place. My reasoning is that having two places for this sort of information is twice as complex as having just one. -- WardCunningham
What about changing CategoryHomePage to CategoryPerson, if the person had significant presence in the past? Note I advocate retention of the page (not the category) even for persons with a history of interactions, whose presence did not seem to promote the concept of PositiveDialogueCommunity. One more thing: before the deletes, we should use the AreYouThere mechanism (ping and/or inpage list), and give adequate waiting time for responses. -- dl DeleteWhenCooked
Just an observation: just because someone doesn't frequently edit their homepage doesn't mean they are permanently gone. I'm reasonably sure that DavidBrady, for instance, is still an active community member, having exchanged email with him recently. The DavidVivash page was restored, too. My personal policy is to not delete home pages, at all.
Fact: David's home page contained personal information and his email address. On both counts, that makes the page useful for anyone who might wish to contact him. Hence the page should not be deleted. If an orphaned home page has no personal details at all, has not been edited for six months, and careful checks show no sign of that person being active on Wiki (for example, no signing with that persons initials), the home page may be deleted. However, if the person also put his name in the visitor's book, a longer period should be allowed (as the page is then not strictly an orphan) - I would suggest two years. In the meanwhile, one might leave a message for the person to see, and include with that message the last-edited date and the previous editor (if apparently the page owner).
It's not a question of when it was last edited; it's a question of if the page is an orphan or not. Think about it: an orphan page is one that is not discussed anywhere else on Wiki - which means that nobody is mentioning that person by name, and that the person is not signing anything anywhere. None of this says anything about the quality of the person, but it says quite a bit about how active that person is here on WardsWiki.
I'm curious: DavidBrady was an orphan page. So how did you know about David's existence and the fact that he comes here? Did he initiate email with you?
And what if someone does not sign anything? Or all signatures are removed? Do you think that there should not be isles in Wiki?
Deleting a home page is not the same as saying "You are not welcome here." It's a statement about how useful such a page is to going to be to other people. I still have no idea how anybody came across DavidBrady if there were no links to him.
I have no idea how I came across David, either. I just know I did. Well, I know he sometimes posts to the XP list. I know he said something insightful enough that PhlIp has a quote by him as one of his sigs. How is any of this relevant to whether we should delete David's home page or not?
I'm curious because most of the time, people never see orphaned pages, so that's why most of them should be deleted. Obviously, you saw DavidBrady's page, which perhaps works as an argument against deletion, but I had no idea how you would've come to such a page without backlinks to point you there.
For me, CategoryHomePage at the end of the page means this is someone else's place and I should use someone else's rules. If someone created this page and it's more than a test page, it should remain. It's like a small personal island in Wiki. It pollutes RandomPages only (did I miss something?), spoils total page count number (is it a big deal?), but is small piece of information.
Can you name a negative side of having such pages?
I'm more interested in catching all the cases where people put a little contact info but they stop coming to Wiki entirely. There are tons of pages like that here: Somebody discovers Wiki in April 2000, writes their own page that says "Gee this is cool! I'll put more here but for now you can email me at johndoe@email.com" and then stops coming here in May 2000. I've been deleting pages that look like this.
Why? What are the benefits of deleting such pages? I'm just curious, not implying that it is not proper on your part to delete such pages. I just want to express my personal reactions to the notion of deleting home pages, and inquire about your views, since we appear to have different views.
Discomfort and uneasiness are the "feelings" component of my reaction. The significance I attribute to these feelings is, pending further examination, that deleting home pages of people who "just happened to drop by" and never came back is somehow "elitist", contrary to Wiki's mission as a place of free expression. Upon further examination, my motives may prove to be even more complex.
Now, Francis (and whoever else); what are your feelings and motives?
Just because something isn't on Wiki doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile subject matter. There are lots of valuable stuff that isn't here for whatever reason. So I don't see homepage deletion as elitist. If somebody stopped coming here, that doesn't mean they're any less valuable of a person, in general. (They're probably happier, what with all the free time they now have to go on bike rides and cook dinner for friends.) It means they are less relevant to this Wiki. No more, no less.
In general, my motivation for stuff like this is to increase the SignalToNoise ratio. If you want to hear about feelings, I guess there's a sense of fatigue, and frustration. I feel like reading pages here - and yes, I do actually read RandomPages, so the quality of that page matters to me - and looking for insight gets to be a harder game to play with every passing month. I'm here to learn. I'm not here to spout, or post. I'm here to find wisdom, and to take it in, and maybe even become a happier person due to it. An abandoned home page does me no good, and I wonder if it does anybody else any good either.
These reasons are understandable, and they honor you.
Perhaps you can give yourself permission to be slightly less responsible all by yourself for the quality of this Wiki. Think how neat this place would be if everyone improved just one page a week ! When we do much more than that - or much less - we are not really setting the right example. Sometimes I think we should act as if we wished everybody else in the world to act just as we do - no better, no worse.
Perhaps you can give yourself permission to improve only one page per week, instead of twenty in one day.
Try it; see how it turns out. What do you say?
As for negative effects, the biggest one I can think of is that it reduces the utility of CategoryHomePage. How often do people actually use that category, if it turns out that 75% of the pages it points to are pages of people who are not here?
Maybe this suggests that CategoryHomePage is less useful than you thought. Or maybe it is indeed the case that people's home pages should be active places. How do you propose to arbitrate between these two equally reasonable ways of interpreting the facts?
More generally, pages should only be here if they are useful to readers. A page that says "There was this random guy here two years ago, and his name isn't anywhere else, but he lives in Colorado and here's his email" is not useful. Wiki's not a phone book.
When I visited a cemetery in Germany, I saw certain graves marked with a sign that read "If you are visiting this grave, please see the caretaker". I later learned that the cemetery had a policy that you were interred for at least x years. After that, it there were no visitors in a y-year period, your headstone would be removed and your site would be available for another. Perhaps a AreYouThere tag for apparently inactive homepages for a year. -- SeanOleary
One more idea that just came up is to make a read-only searchable archive of Wiki somewhere. That would cure many problems.
That would be terrible. WikiNow, ForgiveAndForget, etc. Don't change the technology without thinking through its consequences.
My take:
Search mechanism could be updated by then, to search by date of last edit or something similar.
I moved the following stuff from RecycledHomePages?:
There are loads of HomePages where visitors have moved on. If their homepage is mostly vacant and they've been inactive, their HomePage could be a candidate for recycling.
Many of us don't feel right deleting someone's HomePage without consent, but moving contents to this page ensures their information survives.
It's somewhat nice to let visitors leave a mark to show their passage. For instance, would we have culled JonUdell's homepage in 1996? I would delete old, orphaned aliases, as we use RealNamesPlease. -- SunirShah
I'm not deleting any information, nor am I moving pages with any significance. It all goes here before I delete anything. Essentially, the "Describe JoeBlow? here. My e-mail is joeblow@example.com" pages. I don't feel right deleting them outright, so here they are.
I agree that a home page that says no more than "gee this really works" isn't really a home page and is a candidate for deletion. However, if there is even just enough information to consider saving it here then I would suggest leaving the page in place. My reasoning is that having two places for this sort of information is twice as complex as having just one. -- WardCunningham
Perhaps something like a tag called DeleteAfterOneYear? could be placed on these pages. Then, during the annual WikiSpringCleaning, we can search for these pages and delete any that haven't been edited in over a year. Maybe.
Ok, so what is "enough information to consider saving" from our visitors who have left us?
One thing is being overlooked - although a user's home page may have hardly any true back-links, that user may have made various unsigned contributions which can still be traced to the user by matching IP addresses in the 'Edits In' pages.
Does anyone do that (besides ThreeLetterAgencies)? The only IP address I recognize is Sunir's (and perhaps my own, and sometimes Ward's). I assume that if someone did not sign a contribution or use a UserName cookie, then they are attempting to be an AnonymousDonor.
How about if it's already over 2 years old and has 5 or fewer backlinks, not including change-log pages? That'll give them 3 years to make an edit. I can't imagine anyone being gone 3 years being upset if we deleted their minimalist page.
But what's the gain?
What is the gain of any deletion? ~2591 of the pages here are CategoryHomePage. That's about 12% of all pages. If we intend to improve signal, it's an untapped area. I mean, if we get rid of NataliePortman and JuliaRoberts, why not get rid of a visitor who left a near empty page?
HomePage is very unique thing, why do you think it's decreasing signal to noise?
Why not improve the ratio by enabling the searcher to exclude CategoryHomePage tagged pages? One simple technological solution versus humans spending hours cross-referencing homepages by a set of complicated criteria?
I just deleted my own homepage to save you the work.
I suggest that those concerned that something might be lost by the deletion of any page, not just those declared "Abandoned", exercise their ability to "Archive" that page. I think that would be a GoodThing. -- DonaldNoyes
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