----- Original Message -----
From: jidanni(a)jidanni.org
Date: Friday, March 21, 2008 2:59 pm
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations
To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only
get snapped
up by commercial organizations.
I'm hoping Knol will turn out to be a good repository for "rescued" material
like this. It's more likely to be properly licensed and attributed, since Google is
likely to care about that kind of thing, and since anyone can contribute and earn money
from the ads the rescue effort can be done in a distributed manner more easily.
Of course, the GFDL requires a list of past authors to be included, which won't be
available from just the last version. So rescuing articles that have been redirected
rather than deleted will be easier. But I for one would be quite willing to dig out the
deleted history of an article for anyone who asks, provided it wasn't deleted for
copyvio or libel or other such legal reasons. Is there a category I can put my userpage in
to make that known, perhaps?