On 6/1/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Considering all the other more significant ways Wikipedia violates the letter of the GFDL with article merges and splits and even the occasional perversion of a "merge-and-delete" AfD result, does anyone honestly think we'd ever get in trouble for having hard-to-follow attribution for stuff stashed away on BJAODN?
It also just occurred to me that the same reasoning used for deleting BJAODN (that copy-and-paste moves inherently break GFDL compliance) may also apply to practically every talk page archive subpage on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Archiving_a_talk_page explicitly describes how to do copy-and-paste moves, and I've seen at least one bot out there that does copy-and-paste talk page archiving automatically.
Overly strict enforcement of detailed rules is a classic cause of unintended consequences.
But talk page archives retain dates and signatures (and you know where it came from so you can peruse the actual page history). Some BJAODN content is posted in without any kind of attribution (or indication where it came from). I can see how someone would want to get rid of that, but it hardly justifies deleting every single entry. Some will be GFDL compliant. It appears nuance is lost... again.
Mgm