In regards to the "wikiunderground" site, I have a couple questions. Is it directly tied-in to the Wikimedia software? Or is it just a fast-refreshing crawler? If the latter, is it sufficiently equipped to handle all article deletions?
Secondly, this concept raises a lot of possibilities. First of all, the question of deletion itself. Is there a need to permanently delete pages so that only administrators can view them? Or could we have another userlevel (somewhere between autoconfirmed and admin) called "Pageview" where you could view deleted pages? I mean, this might be a bad idea because it would remove the importance of deletion (why bother deleting a page if some users will be able to view it) but this level might require 6 months and 500 edits. Thirdly, a developer might even want to automate this process, wherein all deleted pages are transfered to a subdomain, perhaps deleted.wikipedia.org or something to that effect. Just some thoughts. Just a thought.
Your suggestion might make sense if there were some greater value to having broad access to deleted content from Wikipedia. Other sites might find something worth seeing among the morass of deleted articles, but a lot of that "content" is poisonous, libelous, or simply and sometimes harmfully wrong. Why would we need to make it easier for people to see that stuff? For the instances where content of relative value is deleted? Those pages would be sort of a needle in a gigantic pile of manure, wouldn't they, and so wouldn't the negatives clearly outweigh the positives on this one?
Nathan
Nathan wrote:
Your suggestion might make sense if there were some greater value to having broad access to deleted content from Wikipedia. Other sites might find something worth seeing among the morass of deleted articles, but a lot of that "content" is poisonous, libelous, or simply and sometimes harmfully wrong. Why would we need to make it easier for people to see that stuff? For the instances where content of relative value is deleted? Those pages would be sort of a needle in a gigantic pile of manure, wouldn't they, and so wouldn't the negatives clearly outweigh the positives on this one?
It's unfortunate that so far we've no mechanism for distinguishing between these different types of deletion. But clearly, a lot of material that's of value to people has been deleted over the years; we have regular controversies over that sort of thing (eg webcomics, characters, episodes, etc.) and we wouldn't have them if people didn't value the stuff that was getting wiped.
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?
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
Nathan wrote:
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.
Yeah, either way there needs to be some sort of human editorial judgement to separate wheat from dross. But very few of the things that get deleted from Wikipedia are likely to put anyone at risk for real legal trouble, so a lot of people seem willing to shoulder the necessary work.
It'd be nice to see some mechanism of differentiating types of deletion right within Wikipedia; a suggestion I've seen before and that I like is a namespace or similar where "non-notable" and other such stuff can be sent, reserving full-blown deletion for stuff like libel and copyright violation. Or even just some method of standardized flagging that could help scavenger sites like wikiunderground sort stuff more easily.
On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Flameviper Velifang theflameysnake@yahoo.com wrote:
In regards to the "wikiunderground" site, I have a couple questions.
Is it directly tied-in to the Wikimedia software? Or is it just a fast-refreshing crawler? If the latter, is it sufficiently equipped to handle all article deletions?
Secondly, this concept raises a lot of possibilities. First of all, the question of deletion itself. Is there a need to permanently delete pages so that only administrators can view them? Or could we have another userlevel (somewhere between autoconfirmed and admin) called "Pageview" where you could view deleted pages? I mean, this might be a bad idea because it would remove the importance of deletion (why bother deleting a page if some users will be able to view it) but this level might require 6 months and 500 edits.
Thirdly, a developer might even want to automate this process, wherein all deleted pages are transfered to a subdomain, perhaps deleted.wikipedia.org or something to that effect.
Just some thoughts.
Just a thought.
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Anyone can see a deletion log, and several admins (including myself) will email or restore a temporary copy to userspace of an article that's not potential libel or copyvio upon a good faith request. If someone comes to me and says "Hey, the article on Character X from Series Y was deleted, I would like a temporary copy of the article and its history to copy to a fan wiki", and said article was not potentially libelous or a copyvio, I'm happy to do so. I guess I don't see the need for this. I think administrative oversight isn't a bad thing when deciding if a deleted article should be available for such purposes.
Hi! Sorry, I've been off the grid the past few days.
To answer your question:
No, Wikiunderground isn't tied into the wikimedia software -- it uses a combination of screen-scraping, exporting, etc. You can read more about that at http://code.google.com/wikiunderground -- note that the scripts are actually offline right now as I get a couple things working on my computer.
Wikiunderground could in theory handle all article deletions, but it doesn't need to because there's already a site that does that: deletionpedia -- http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com
However, I think there are a couple problems that prevent deletionpedia from attracting a community on its own, and make it more valuable as a companion project or a sort of go-to resource. (These are copy-pasted from another email I sent someone.)
1. The deletionpedia layout is a little depressing -- even the name. It's all about deletion. But stuff is already getting deleted; deletionpedia is really about *preservation* and making things public. People need to feel like they're having fun.
2. Deletionpedia is a static archive, which means there's no opportunity for anything except reading, and the whole draw of wikipedia is around editing.
3. Deletionpedia doesn't interface as well with wikipedia as it could -- the links all point to a blank-ish page that then points to wikipedia. Wikiunderground does it a different way, partly because I'm a much worse programmer than the deletionpedia guy -- it does a find-and-replace on incoming articles that prepends "wikipedia:" to every link.
On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Flameviper Velifang theflameysnake@yahoo.com wrote:
In regards to the "wikiunderground" site, I have a couple questions.
Is it directly tied-in to the Wikimedia software? Or is it just a fast-refreshing crawler? If the latter, is it sufficiently equipped to handle all article deletions?
Secondly, this concept raises a lot of possibilities. First of all, the question of deletion itself. Is there a need to permanently delete pages so that only administrators can view them? Or could we have another userlevel (somewhere between autoconfirmed and admin) called "Pageview" where you could view deleted pages? I mean, this might be a bad idea because it would remove the importance of deletion (why bother deleting a page if some users will be able to view it) but this level might require 6 months and 500 edits.
Thirdly, a developer might even want to automate this process, wherein all deleted pages are transfered to a subdomain, perhaps deleted.wikipedia.org or something to that effect.
Just some thoughts.
Just a thought.
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