We are reconsidering our strategy for archiving outdated pages on ArchWiki [1], see [2] for the full discussion if interested. Currently, we don't do any archiving, we simply delete obsolete pages (after being flagged with 'Template:Out of date' or 'Template:Deletion' for some time of course).
I would like to ask a question regarding one of the suggestions, which is to make Special:Undelete [3] available for everybody (by assigning 'deletedhistory', 'deletedtext' and 'browsearchive' rights to all groups). This is the most simple, but also most controversial way to solve our problem. The main question is regarding security, because obviously this feature is intended for administrators only.
The only bad implication we could think of is if somebody creates a defamatory page and we delete it, we wouldn't be able to prevent anyone from linking to the deleted revision(s) and thus exposing the wiki to possible legal consequences. However, the same attack could be carried out on an already existing useful article, and the same fix could be used in both cases, i.e. using the RevisionDelete [4] feature.
We would also appreciate any other comments on why this is a good/bad idea, suggestions of another archiving solution etc.
Regards, Lahwaacz (ArchWiki admin)
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_page [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:Requests#Should_we_remove_or_a... [3]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Undelete [4]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:RevisionDelete
On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, at 19:03, Jakub Klinkovský wrote:
We are reconsidering our strategy for archiving outdated pages on ArchWiki [1], see [2] for the full discussion if interested. Currently, we don't do any archiving, we simply delete obsolete pages (after being flagged with 'Template:Out of date' or 'Template:Deletion' for some time of course).
I would like to ask a question regarding one of the suggestions, which is to make Special:Undelete [3] available for everybody (by assigning 'deletedhistory', 'deletedtext' and 'browsearchive' rights to all groups). This is the most simple, but also most controversial way to solve our problem. The main question is regarding security, because obviously this feature is intended for administrators only.
A Wikimedia project has a notion of archiving pages. This is done by manually adding an {{archive}} tag and manually protecting them.
Is there some merit in using a separate namespace for old pages? Can namespace automatically impose a level of protection?
svetlana
On 18.08.14 at 19:48, svetlana wrote:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, at 19:03, Jakub Klinkovský wrote:
We are reconsidering our strategy for archiving outdated pages on ArchWiki [1], see [2] for the full discussion if interested. Currently, we don't do any archiving, we simply delete obsolete pages (after being flagged with 'Template:Out of date' or 'Template:Deletion' for some time of course).
I would like to ask a question regarding one of the suggestions, which is to make Special:Undelete [3] available for everybody (by assigning 'deletedhistory', 'deletedtext' and 'browsearchive' rights to all groups). This is the most simple, but also most controversial way to solve our problem. The main question is regarding security, because obviously this feature is intended for administrators only.
A Wikimedia project has a notion of archiving pages. This is done by manually adding an {{archive}} tag and manually protecting them.
Is there some merit in using a separate namespace for old pages? Can namespace automatically impose a level of protection?
svetlana
We are considering also using a separate namespace for archiving purpose, but the main reason why we don't like it is that the content of the archived pages is not hidden, and thus links from archived pages would pollute other pages' backlinks and some special pages (e.g. Special:MostLinkedPages).
-- Lahwaacz
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