When Someone Leaves Wiki

How do you deal with somebody's contributions when they leave wiki?

Every so often, a wiki member leaves. Sometimes the reasons are positive, sometimes they are negative. In either case, is there any consensus as to how the community should treat the contributions they leave behind?

Should we be more careful about refactoring their contributions? What if they said something controversial that you might want clarification on, or you might want to dispute? It might be pointless to react to the contribution, since the original poster is not around to keep the conversation going. If you're lucky, someone else will feel much the same way and perhaps join the conversation. But if the contribution is especially controversial - and some people who leave wiki leave especially controversial contributions scattered everywhere - perhaps nobody will take it up.

If a statement goes cold in this way, what's the best way to deal with it? Its presence on the page will be a permanent impediment to many sorts of refactorings. Yet to simply delete it seems somehow unsporting.

How can one know when someone has left? Well apart from noisy exits, if they don't appear to be around, maybe they are just taking a break or lurking.

This seems to be a non-issue, due to all the reasons WhyWikiWorks. Refactor old contributions, turn ThreadMode into DocumentMode. Delete irrelevant content. If anyone disagrees, they'll revert it or re-refactor it.

Not much of the above seems to take place, although it should. Is it too much work?

I think you just haven't been around long enough. Refactoring happens all the time.

Nobody's contributions are uneditable. That is one of the reasons WhyWikiWorks. Some people have a problem refactoring signed contributions, and others adopt the OpenAuthor WikiBadge, in order to encourage refactoring of their comments. When someone leaves, they lose the ability to monitor contributions and maintain their point of view.

Okay, let's state this not in terms of personal rights, but in terms of what the Wiki loses.

Let's say some contentious person shows up on Wiki, makes a lot of interesting, provocative statements in a number of pages. Then after a few months, gets frustrated with the opposition they encounter here and leave.

Weeks or months after that person leaves, I come across one of the pages that they were participating in heavily, and it's a mess, as pages often are after a period of red-hot ThreadMode. I think, "Hey, somebody ought to refactor this, both to aid readers, and to enable further conversation." (People seem to stop contributing to a page once it sprawls too much - resembles UseNet too much at that point, I suppose?)

But! I don't feel like I can unilaterally refactor that controversial person's opinion, seeing as how 1) I entirely disagree with almost everything they said, and 2) as is common when people participate in ThreadMode, they made a number of statements that are interesting, but not entirely clear or incomplete. If that person were still around, I could gently start refactoring, and expect that the other person will pipe up. But they're not, and in the meantime their contributions are these bristly, contentious chunks of text that refuse to be easily synthesized.

I'm not worried about the other person's feelings, but I genuinely do want these divergent opinions to be retained in the resulting synthesis. It seems to me that Wiki would be richer if we could retain that departed Wikizen's contributions, but perhaps that's impossible.

Ok, what can be done. First, you can try to contact him and inform him about your intent to refactor. He should have a homepage here. The homepage should have an email address. Second, you can keep a copy of the ControversialPage. Name it ControversialPageOriginal. So he and anyone can control your work and return to the original if you should not succeed. If the OP does not respond, no-one opposes to the refactoring, the copy of the original might be deleted after a few months. Or we can keep it as an example for a successful refactoring. -- HelmutLeitner

Types of departures:

Casual visitor/contributor stops visiting. Virtually nobody notices.
Significant contributor stops visiting as often (sometimes gradually, sometimes sudden)
Various disgruntled types leave (rarely quietly, sometimes in a huff, sometimes in a minute and a huff).
Someone leaves involuntarily because they no longer have access to the web. They could be dead. If I lose web access, I'm not going!

Just edit pages to contain interesting content, presented clearly and enjoyably. Whether somebody's "here" or not doesn't matter.