[OSM-dev] Deleting Wiki Contents (was: Street Addresses with Relations?)

[Karl Newman]

On Dec 25, 2007 2:52 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Karl Newman wrote:
>  > The proposal page is a
> > mess, and I'm tempted to wipe it out and start over.
>
> This is something that should be done more often, and more liberally, on
> our Wiki. Only recently someone said on the German-language mailing list
> "well since using the coastline tag is deprecated..." and I went "WHAT?"
> - turns out that someone, with the very best intentions, accidentally
> resurrected half-year-old arguments against coastline tagging from the
> Wiki page and somehow created a conclusion that sounded like "coastline
> tagging is dead".
>
> I know that in the big Wikis, there's a culture of never deleting
> other's comments on the talk page lest you step on their toes, but in a
> fast-moving environment like ours where people's attention is sometimes
> very sporadic, I think we should really delete (or at least, archive,
> but then the Wiki does that for us) anything that does not reflect the
> current state of affairs.
>
> Bye
> Frederik

Yes, I noticed that on this Wiki as well--there's a lot of old,
superseded information hanging around. Also a lot of isolated,
poorly-connected pages with conflicting information (instead of
expanding an existing page). I've been guilty of that, too (adding to
a page instead of editing) in keeping with what I perceived to be the
prevailing attitude. Seems like this project is in need of a
benevolent (or otherwise?) dictator. (I'm not volunteering).

Karl