The difference here being that it is not a professional system. If you mess with the crowd
the crowd does not generally go where you prefer it to, it goes home.
Other potential contributors see what has been done, and decide not to waste their efforts
where outsiders can throw their work away. (outsiders meaning people not from the project
that is being closed).
Preserving as read only in another place is far more acceptable and indicates respect for
one's efforts, even when times have changed. Internal deletion, change and general
editing is a completely different issue. It is a given when you start. It is implied by
CC-by-sa licence.
Cheers,
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andy
Mabbett
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2019 6:50 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Supporting Wikinews [was: Reviewing our brand system for our
2030 goals]
On Wed, 17 Apr 2019 at 15:31, Peter Southwood
<peter.southwood(a)telkomsa.net> wrote:
Abandoning a project and shutting it down sends a
message to all volunteers
that their work could be similarly abandoned and lost one day.
For some value of "lost" - it's likely, in this case, that all the
content would be preserved, either by making the wiki read-only, or
perhaps migrating articles to, say, Wikisource.
Sure, things like some portal pages, templates and categories might be
discarded, but that can happen to the work of any of us, on any
project, anyway.
We have a related, but different, issue at Wikispecies .Technically at
least, that project is now (or could soon be, with a few tweaks)
wholly redundant to Wikidata, and could be populated using
Listeria-like scripts or templates, from what is held in Wikidata.
The Wikispecies community vehemently resist this, and respond with
suggestions that data in Wikispecies (held in a variety of templates,
as well as much unstructured prose) should be what is edited, and
should be used in a reverse of the above process to somehow magically
populate Wikidata.
So we continue to maintain versions of the same data on two (or more:
Wikipedias and Commons also do their own things with biological
taxonomy) vastly different projects, diluting the impact of all of our
volunteer-hours. Anyone who commissioned a system like this in a
professional capacity would be sacked for incompetence.
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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