Paul, I happen to agree that the way content changes is one of the most fascinating things that we have.  My work with the Analytics team won't be done until we have a nice way to do this kind of research.  Right now, people can use the historical dumps but that's very unfriendly.

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 4:28 PM, Paul J. Weiss <paul@paulweiss.info> wrote:
For my particular interests, I am fine with that. But I think historians would disagree. A lot can be learned from documented ideas that didn't come to fruition.

Paul

At 2015-10-15  11:08 am, you wrote:
Hi,Â

You are all correct on archiving old pages that might be of research interest. We are all for that. The pages we hope to delete are about systems that never existed but were just talked about, and the idea was replaced by something else that exists now. It doesn't make sense for us to have those pages. Anything that is about something has been worked on, and is not active any more will be archived.

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Paul J. Weiss <paul@paulweiss.info> wrote:
I am definitely on the side of archiving rather than deleting. Some of my research interests involve looking at past documentation. Retrieving outdated documentation is okay, as long as it is clear immediately that it is indeed outdated. We can also enable searching from within WMF webspace to exclude outdated documentation. There are many ways to accomplish these goals: adding "Archived" to the title, making a new namespace, using categories, etc.

Paul

Paul J. Weiss
PhD student, Information science
University of Washington

At 2015-10-15  10:48 am, you wrote:
>I've always thought that blanking the page and replacing it with a template which says it's historical and links to the historical version of the page would be a good solution that balances preserving history with deemphasizing outdated information.

This would make info show up in searches still, which we definitely do not want. Seems that deleting is a better option.

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Neil P. Quinn <nquinn@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I've always thought that blanking the page and replacing it with a template which says it's historical and links to the historical version of the page would be a good solution that balances preserving history with deemphasizing outdated information.
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org > wrote:
> We have a documentation cleanup day coming up soon, and we've just got
> delete permissions so we can actually clean.
Please don't delete old content, mark it as {{historical}} or
{{outdated}} and archive it instead.


I'm all for following the norm here, but wouldn't that mean it still shows up in searches?  That's what I'm trying to avoid, minimizing the confusion.Â

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