On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
The reason I've contributed to Wikipedia over the years is because I enjoy increasing the amount of information that's generally accessible to the world. So yeah, anything that can save material like this is a good thing, IMO. If someone wishes to wade through manure to find gems, why stop them?
If there was a way to mark deleted content as "harmless" or "accurate but not appropriate for inclusion" then I think that allowing wider access to that material would be fine. I think there would be a fairly small number of "resurrections" where content was returned to the encyclopedia without objection, but if people wanted to look it up and make it available in some other way I wouldn't have a problem with that. The difficulty is that you can't compartmentalize it, you have to allow people access to the crap along with everything else. When the crap is harmful or patently offensive, broader access isn't something you want.
Nathan