[WikiEN-l] Deletion of articles, archival, etc.

[Ben Yates]

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 at 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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-- 
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://enotes.com/blogs/wikipedia