Delete These Pages
Delete These PagesWiki isn't a democracy. You don't like some page or other, move it or delete it yourself. It would be nice if you observed the form on GoodWikiCitizen, but really why should someone else do your work for you?
Wiki does have a mission statement - "An InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas". The interpretation of that brief is however - for reasons that relate to WhyWikiWorks - extremely broad, so that Wiki touches on a great variety of topics. Wiki is at its most pleasant when, on its core subjects of creativity and design as they relate to programming, it offers a diversified but densely connected tissue of valuable insights and factual observations.
therefore,
Diversity should be valued, and contributors with a background different from the norm encouraged, lest opportunities for expanding the scope of Wiki be lost.
but
The value of Wiki is undermined when discussions get stuck, and no interesting insights or consensus emerge from a continuing debate. We call this StuckNess. Some topics and some forms of discussion are more susceptible than others to StuckNess and therefore should be treated with more caution, and discussed with adapted techniques.
Topics susceptible to StuckNess include : religious or political issues, in particular when contributors are proselytizing for their camp. Forms susceptible to StuckNess include : very long pages in ThreadMode, ThreadMode with lots of branching threads, or ThreadMess.
Some gentle techniques that can alleviate StuckNess :
Some experimental results
The current considerable improvement to this page resulted from someone taking a RefactoringDeadline seriously. A RefactoringDeadline for TheVisitationDiscussion was however ignored for a month or more. Still, the threat may have helped participants accept an eventual, big reduction.
An extreme version of RefactorFasterDeleteMore was attempted on some pages in April 2000, but turned out to be a poor solution at that time. Paradoxically RFDM resulted in exacerbated ThreadMess, possibly even IrrevocableThreadMode, as contributors infuriated by having some of their text deleted, or distorted as a result of a change of context, restored backups and posted flames in defense of the original versions. Arguably, though, a gentler form of RefactorFasterDeleteMore has worked well more recently on pages like IrrevocableThreadMode itself (skillfully refactored by a number of the participants not long after the initial ThreadMess) and ChristianIntellectual (ThreadMode retained but unnecessary emotional or "meta" interaction removed not long after creation of the page). The refactoring of this page today was a very good example of the DeleteMore? aspect of RFDM, a few weeks after the main ThreadMess, with minimal loss of signal. A same day clean up of JesusGodAndMan also seemed to work fine, despite the polarities involved. As this example and others show RefactorFasterDeleteMore is often best used with RefactorByCondensingConversation, keeping signatures but cleaning up ordering and sloppy or conversational text. See AlistairCockburn's last comment in ImproveSignalAndReadability.
RefactorByCondensingConversation has been used on Wiki for years. One of its most noted exponents is AlistairCockburn, in pages such as SoftwareCannotBeModeled and MethodOrMethodology. Alistair didn't appear to have suffered flame death as a result of these practices when last seen at dinner in London. As a page, and perhaps as a concept, RefactorByCondensingConversation seemed to be mothballed by a stray delete and redirect six months ago. More recently TheVisitationDiscussion was reduced to 25% of its former size, a couple of months after the main threads died down. Signatures were retained and participants seem conciser than before. No complaints have yet been received.
PreSuppositionalApologetics were proposed as a solution to the "mode of discourse" problem; the idea was to let highly polarized religious or ethical issues be discussed in a gentler manner, initially by agreeing to disagree but state assumptions more precisely, on separate pages. Not much consensus has yet emerged from these pages. The outworking may be a fairly slow moving FiveYearPhenomenon? on Wiki, if the community is willing, not dissimilar to the nature of consciousness topics initially touched on in MistakesOfRogerPenrose and elsewhere.
See ThreadModeFalselyBlamed, StuckNess
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