[WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/01/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > It pretty much does.
> >
> > No, it pretty much does not.
> >
> > Should we do this a few more times, or can we perhaps add some content
> > to the discussion?
>
> There is no objective ay to judge the imporance of any internal
> debate. Thus we have to keep records of them.~~~~

See, this is the thing. I very much doubt the delete-all-afd theory
was meant to extend to having it a hassle to get at those deleted
pages; the obvious corrolary is to have a policy that, if someone
wants to read the content of an old debate, you undelete it for them
for a day or two.

Think of it as a library. We're not burning all these tedious
administrative documents, nor are we declaring them classified; we're
just taking them off the public shelves and putting them in the
storage room in the basement. If people want one, they can ask at the
desk.

There isn't anything *wrong* with these administrative documents,
sure. But they clutter up the shelves, and people keep finding them in
keyword searches in the catalogue and getting all overexcited (because
there really isn't anything interesting in 99% of them), and we're
never *completely* sure that people aren't wandering into the stacks
and cutting pages out or adding new ones in - they're all loose-leaf -
so they can go back and quote them later.

Switching metaphors for a moment... There are a lot of
freedom-of-information or government-transparency laws in the world. A
lot of them have provisions against governments putting up undue
barriers to access - expensive charges, or classifying everything
"secret", or having "public viewing" of documents for one hour a week
on the third Sunday in March in the National Archives but only if you
know about it and remember the back door is unlocked.

None of them considers "writing to a civil servant and asking for a
copy" to be in any way a barrier to transparency.

(Actually, a few do think so - on grounds of illiteracy. But the
actual "asking a civil servant" part is okay, you just get to do it
verbally)

We are bizzarely, insanely transparent. It's great. But that doesn't
mean we can't reduce our level of public exposure a tiny, tiny smidge
and still be hugely transparent. Not everything done on Wikipedia is
public, remember - we don't display details of checkuser logs, or edit
summaries of deleted material - so it's not like we're starting from
an absolute pinnacle of crystal-clear perfection. We're doing damn
well; even with this change we'd be doing damn well.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk