[Board] wiki cleanup
Tom Kralidis
tomkralidis at gmail.com
Tue May 28 09:19:45 PDT 2019
Hi Arnulf: ditching the whole wiki was certainly never the intention, but I'm
glad the below discussion ensued with your detailed notes on archiving below
nonetheless.
..Tom
On Tue, 28 May 2019, Seven (Aka Arnulf) wrote:
> Date: Tue, 28 May 2019 17:57:56 +0200
> From: "Seven (Aka Arnulf)" <seven at arnulf.us>
> To: Jody Garnett <jody.garnett at gmail.com>
> Cc: osgeo-board List <board at lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: [Board] wiki cleanup
>
> Redirect to Archive is great to keep pages which may have historic value in
> context. In other cases a two step deletion is also perfectly OK. Just
> ditching the whole Wiki rang my alarm bells.
>
> Not sure if using the board f2f gives OSGeo the best value of your time
> though? You should be talking through contentious issues (there always are).
> Outdated pages tend to get lost in history eventually. But maybe you are
> really well organized and can focus on the important pages. I wouldn't really
> know where to start, it is pretty overwhelming. :-) Therefore a big Kudos to
> the board for (trying to) tackle this!
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Am 28.05.19 um 17:01 schrieb Jody Garnett:
>> That is lots of great experience, I think I used redirect to the Archive
>> page. Do you like this approach?
>>
>> For the board f2f meeting we are looking at reviewing all the pages the
>> board is responsible for and sorting out what can be approved and what can
>> be archived so the out dated information (or great idea that did not
>> happen) does not confuse.
>>
>> On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 16:08 Seven (Aka Arnulf) <seven at arnulf.us
>> <mailto:seven at arnulf.us>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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 <mailto:neteler at osgeo.org>>
>> >> To: "Seven of Nine (aka Arnulf)" <seven at arnulf.us
>> <mailto:seven at arnulf.us>>
>> >> Cc: Tom Kralidis <tomkralidis at gmail.com
>> <mailto:tomkralidis at gmail.com>>,
>> >> osgeo-board List <board at lists.osgeo.org
>> <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>>
>>
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>>
>> --
>> --
>> Jody Garnett
>
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