[Board] wiki cleanup

[Seven (Aka Arnulf)]

Am 28.05.19 um 13:02 schrieb Tom Kralidis:
>
> On Tue, 28 May 2019, Markus Neteler wrote:
>
>> Date: Tue, 28 May 2019 11:24:01 +0200
>> From: Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org>
>> To: "Seven of Nine (aka Arnulf)" <seven at arnulf.us>
>> Cc: Tom Kralidis <tomkralidis at gmail.com>,
>>     osgeo-board List <board at lists.osgeo.org>
>> Subject: Re: [Board] wiki cleanup
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 8:55 PM Seven of Nine (aka Arnulf)
>> <seven at arnulf.us> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi folks,
>>> great idea to give the Wiki some love and way overdue. But broken 
>>> URLs are a sign of careless web people. Lost history is too. 
>>> MediWiki goes out of its ways not to break URLs and keep histories 
>>> intact and they are actually doing a great job. So I see no sense in 
>>> ditching all and copying "vital/current". Nobody can tell what is 
>>> still alive or needed. Is old < vital (asks an oldtimer... :-)
>>>
>>> So /me is very much in favor of keeping all and deleting and merging 
>>> bluntly. Those who really care or look for something can follow the 
>>> bread crumb to the start of the Wiki. How cool is that? Imagine a 
>>> history student in 2056 tracing back to a few folks sitting in 
>>> Chicago and debating the need of free or open in a name. Would be a 
>>> pity to loose that, wouldn't it?
>>
>> My plea as a former board member: Please do not trash our history.
>>
>> Cleanup is fine and needed but keeping important (historical) pages 
>> alive.
>>
>> Best
>> Markus
>
> Thanks for the valuable feedback. Would cleaning up the wiki in effect be
> losing history as well?  Nonetheless, fully agree not to lose history.
>
> ..Tom


Tom, Board,

regular users cannot delete pages. This is a feature restricted to 
Sysops by MediaWiki (see current list of OSGeo Sysops: 
https://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&group=sysop). 
Even when sysops delete pages they can still be recreated by any other 
sysop from the internal archive. This is to avoid that somebody 
permanently changes the history of the Wiki without being able to 
recover it. Removing content completely from MediaWiki is possible but 
requires server access and scripts or extended SQL hacks. An extreme 
situation that could be imagined would be that the CoC decides that 
something has to be completely eradicated from the database in which 
case they should probably file a ticket for SAC.

When sysops delete pages it does effectively change the history for 
normal users. Therefore deletions should be done considerately and only 
by trusted community members (e.g. the sysops of this Wiki). Hundreds of 
Spam pages have for example already been deleted like that.

Still, deleting old, outdated and especially wrong pages may be 
required. Even then in many cases it will serve better to merge the 
content with another page or to add a redirect than to simply delete 
because deletions break the Web. It is very easy to "move" a MediaWiki 
page by adding the functional link like [[redirect:New Name]] to the 
corresponding content page where "New Name" is the content URL. Many 
users have added redirects from their full names to their default user 
pages, like here: 
https://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Anita_Graser&redirect=no


My suggestion is to create a new tag, for example [[Category: 
Deletion]]. Any regular user can add this tag to any page. Sysops would 
then periodically go through this Category, double check the deletion 
suggestions and if they appear sensible delete the outdated or dead 
content or - better even - add a more appropriate redirect to the page. 
I pledge to do this for two hours per week for the next three months 
(and then we can revisit the item and see how we proceeded).

Rationale: When we moved to the new web site (which was a good thing) we 
unfortunately also lost quite a lot of links (which is bad). Especially 
a lot of links from the Wiki to the old web site now end up in a 404 
which is simply not good.

Keeping the Wiki and only moving things around, adding redirects and 
only deleting in "very-dead-content" cases would be my favorite way 
forward.

If there are other concerns regarding the current Wiki which I may 
completely miss, please enlighten us.


Thanks,

Seven