Delete Pages Automatically

If ever the total pages exceeds 200,000 if may be sense to delete pages.

Well no sane person will delete pages manually, so I propose this rules:

a. a new page receives a value, e.g value = 100 b. at every time the page is viewed the value = value + 1 c. at every time the page is edited the value = value + 25 d. at every timestep the value=value-1 size of timestep depends on actual number of pages and maximum number of pages.

This is the way to do it.

Why do we need to do this automatically? And why do you say "no sane person will delete pages manually"? I just deleted about ten pages this week. Felt great. Now imagine how much better the Wiki would be if everybody did that.

Well, I also do delete pages myself, so it's just a way of saying; see also my contribution in WikiSpringCleaning

GerardBuisman

I would argue that to DeletePagesAutomatically is a poor idea, and it undermines the basic principles of WhyWikiWorks. Human, not automated, editing is an important principle. The DEFINITION of "too many" pages is not some fixed number (200,000), but rather "enough to annoy people sufficiently that they decide to exert the effort to perform a WikiSpringCleaning. If no one is sufficiently motivated, then the number of pages is clearly not "too many".

-- MichaelChermside

Though probably what Gerard is reacting to is the possibility that there are people here who would like to delete (as well as do other sorts of refactoring activities), but think that the backlash from people will be too great to be worth the effort. That's a social problem, and it needs a social solution, but that solution still hasn't been worked out.

Perhaps it's worth calculating the above metric, even if the deletion is not automatic. This would give an inverse of RecentChanges for those people in the mood to do some cleaning.

My idea is inspired by ALife, simulations with critters that procreate, mutate, and die when they lack fitness. I use this (above mentioned) way to keep the population within a certain limit.

When you delete pages, you can wonder why you should delete any page. OffTopic issues can be OnTopic in the opinion of somebody else.

Pages are also OnFocus and OffFocus. Most OffFocus pages won't be deleted, just because nobody will edit them, so no RecentChangesJunkie is aware of that page.

You can also edit an important page by placing it in a certain focus, adding Category_This_And_That, you can add WikiNames in a page to set a page in focus, etcetera.

What I wonder about is: Why should anyone delete pages? I mean pages with content. You can also place them OffFocus, by unlinking ItsName? into its name.

The size of the Wiki is no problem. Probably Ward can store up as much as 10GByte and this Wiki isn't over 1GByte, and by the time this Wiki is grown into 10GByte he can store 100GByte.

WikiAtTwentyThousand and PageTwentyThousandHistory. Wiki is at 27889 pages at the moment (May 24 2004). To count pages, just search for a nonsense word: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?search=zastruga

What benefit would the WikiCommunity (wiki is about community isn't it?) gain from deleting rarely visited pages?

None, but pages are deleted, so by automating the job it would actually result in less deleting. gb ( btw I do not think wiki is about community, people is about community, wiki is just a way to edit and create pages)

I don't follow. Pages that are deleted manually are typically contentless, or else their useful content is moved to another page. Deleting automatically would get rid of content without putting it anywhere else.

The point is to get rid of the bad and keep the good. I don't see how an automated system could determine what's good or bad. -- JonathanTang

Automatic deletion would be like a library discarding books that haven't been checked out in a long time. BadIdea! I read this in a ConnieWillis? novel recently and I need to check to see if my local library has any policy like that. It's such a stupid idea that it might be happening! --RonJandrasi (natural cynic)

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