Least Recent Changes

With the advent of RecentChanges, many visitors to the wiki, and many long-time residents, have focused on the most recent edits and ignored, or not been aware of, the wealth of information lying untouched and unseen for years.

Further, some of the forgotten pages would benefit from being linked to by some of the newer material, and vice versa.

The idea, then, is to list the pages which have gone unchanged for the longest time. The problem remains:

: Once found, what do we do?

The intent is to make this wiki better, so every action should have that in mind. Editing a page simply for the sake of editing it is clearly wrong. Deleting a page simply because it's old is clearly wrong.

Judgement must be exercised, actions executed with care. Not every page needs to be touched. Possible actions include, but are not limited to:

Page linked to and from
Category added
- Only sometimes - PleasePleaseDontCategorizeEveryPageOnWiki
Page trimmed, edited and tidied
Page deleted
PAGE LEFT ALONE
- Please don't forget this one - it's a very real option.

The original discussion remains below, untouched. Please make edits in the light of the above summary, and enhance the above into DocumentMode.

Thank you.

-- WikiGnome

It would need to take into account merit somehow - perhaps ratio of total changes against time since last change. On the grounds that something of so much interest back then might have some interest now.

There's a quotation on the DeadPoetsSociety page about trying to use formulae to derive a measure of "merit" ...

No, this is perfectly simple and adequate. Things will stay on the LeastRecentChanges list, or else get deleted as useless, or else get changed and go to RecentChanges. Merit is irrelevant.

(From DeathByPerfection)

The illusion that all pages are still fresh is a DeceptivePractice. -- from TemporalContext at MeatBall

Unfortunately more often than not, pages have UseByDate. And Pages that have passed their UsedByDate? are a WikiSmell. If WikiZens do not fix up WikiSmells, then it will snowball until the ' WholeWikiSmells .

We do not have evergrowing number of WikiZens to check for WikiSmells. And therefore we cannot support an infinitely growing wiki. -- DavidLiu (NotaDeleteVulture)

And sadly, lack of tolerance and vandalism in this world is growing, that means more time is needed to FixBrokenWindows, even with a static list of reasonably good pages.

Do we have a script that will retrieve last change date for all pages? If not...

We can get 30 people together to examine all pages that exist, we can get a list of pages that have not been touched over 5 years.

Within this list there will be huge opportunities for deleting pages with minimal controversy. And improve OnTopic pages with dead information as well.

I am concerned that people will regard a page as meritless simply because it's been around for a long time. Some of the oldest, longest untouched pages are in fact the most valuable. Certainly some of the most recent pages are effectively contentless.

I started this section and I share your concern. I do have a bigger concern that some OnTopic pages have passed their UsedByDate? due to lack of maintenance. It affects the credibility of other pages with good information.
Having said that, I recognise there are pages with an air of TimeLessness to them. These can either be OnTopic, or OffTopic pages.
If a "perfect" OnTopic page gets deleted by people who have overlooked its beauty, then I suppose other people who had that appreciation could retrieve from backup (maybe personal ones), and restore them. In that instance it is likened to the "rebirth of phoenix".
- What I may be suggesting is for those of us that have "dear to the heart" pages to start backing things up onto a personal wiki.
- I do find sometimes the history of evolution (of a page) itself tell a story, not sure whether I want to go the extreme of backing up history as well.

See LeastRecentChangesLists