Wiki Spring Cleaning Discussion

Wiki Spring Cleaning Discussion

Moved from WikiSpringCleaning

March 18th is also the day after St Patrick's Day. WikiSpringCleaning is a simple way to atone for your real-life excesses without aggravating a Post-Situational Ethanol Toxicity.

Another bout of deletions occurred on and about April 13th.

We could call April 15th (Tax Day in the UnitedStates) the end of the WikiSpringCleaning. That gives you a month to FixYourWiki. Plus, there's nothing more taxing than dinging RecentChanges every 5 seconds to see what else has been deleted.

What Page Belongs or Doesn't

My personal criteria as to whether I think a page belongs here is a question of pragmatism, not topicality. Does the page work? Because of the nature of the medium, a successful Wiki page needs a tremendous amount of goodwill, respect, and trust from all the participants.

Many of the SociologyWiki pages failed on that account. And they had no hope of improving, barring the miraculous appearance of a refactorer with Solomonic patience and Herculean persistence. So rather than wait around for such a RefactorerExMachina, I decided to do something about it. -- francis

Who reads Archived or Useless Pages

I figure most pages in a Wiki are archive pages; nobody reads them, and nobody is bothered by those pages. This is similar to many real archives with old paperwork that is hardly ever read.

In a Wiki, the lifespan of a visitor is much smaller then in real life. A lot of people are around only a couple of months. Some of these people have minds of their own, they think and may write some sense; others may write some nonsense, using a Wiki to kick around; some write some advertisements.

Well, let them be. I figure you should delete a page only when you change the name of the page, or when someone writes NonSens, and some one starts to edit that NonSens page.

All the other useless pages are just useless, the way life itself is useless. No need to delete those pages at all.

A problem can arise when the space is crammed and there is no more room for any more content. This is basically a site on programming, so in this case someone will pop up with a simple way to DeletePagesAutomatically.

This is really simple to do.

-- GerardBuisman

Noise and pages with little to say

Noisy pages are fuel for the WikiFire. [Another person] OTOH I see maybe 30 contributions or less in the past two days, and most of these has very little to say.

Moved from PleasePleaseDontCategorizeEveryPageOnWiki

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages in this wiki which need to be categorized, refactored or deleted. At the same time, this wiki is growing fast. A wiki of this size needs - like a house - a regular cleaning process: WikiSweeping?. Usually, this can't be done by one person, but it could be organized as a shared activity. -- HelmutLeitner

VolunteerHousekeeper has a few pages related to the current attempt to gather information on how to become a good WikiGnome.

Candidates For SpringCleaning?

Some pages that are candidates for spring cleaning: http:shorts.cgi.

Possible other candidates: OrphanPages in the CategoryHomePage? (Older than a certain age, of course. Let's say a year?) See AreYouThere.

For the spring cleaning effort, those who are interested could each be given a specific date/time frame to search for on google. For instance you could search for "site:c2.com 'edited September 6, 1996'" and that would show you YarnWeb which happens to be quite an interesting page. But other dates will turn up less useful pages. Hopefully, the idea is clear. With some organization, many hundreds of old HomePage(s) that may not be useful could be removed. -- AdamBurton

Not noticed, read or edited, is not necessarily a metric for deletion

We need to find a way to archive, if not delete, old pages that may still look reasonable, but have had little activity in recent years

Typically, there are only a small number of people who have good knowledge regarding the content of the pages kept on Wiki. People who have both the depth and breadth of knowledge in all technology subjects covered here are extremely rare, and busy. The rest of us don't have a good idea of the quality of information, nor of the views expressed.

I would be inclined to deactivate even a wiki article on the Sciences authored by a Nobel laureate, if the page has had little or no activity years after creation. How many people would find it useful to read material on classical mechanics authored by Sir Issac Newton?

Let us overcome our fears about accidental removal of dated "good" material. Otherwise the wiki would be clogged by old material that may be of interest only to historians. -- DeleteWhenCooked

Spring Cleaning should be thought of in dimensions other than that cleaning means "throwing out the unneeded and useless" but also in the framework of cleaning up old pages, repairing broken things, as in BrokenLinks, polishing up and replacing worn out and inoperative things, removing graffiti from pages, dividing and combining of parts of pages, correcting spelling and grammar, and so on. In that light, here are some pages on values to be considered and practices which should be observed in well-constructed pages:

Good Measure of a Page's Worth

Consider a page that contains much that is true, useful, accurate, and is so well expressed that no one has had reason to edit it since for years. Would you delete it? Of course not.

The aim of this wiki is to have information in DocumentMode, and when successful the result is that pages will see no action at all. This is absolutely not a good measure of a page's worth.

CategoryDiscussion