[OSM-talk] An Archive namespace for the OSM wiki?

[Jochen Topf]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 10:02:48PM +0200, Michael Reichert wrote:
> there is currently a voting on a Deletion Policy [1] for the OSM wiki.
> The policy was drafted because we had two incidents last year when
> someone tried to delete a large number of old and orphaned tagging
> proposals in draft state. He claimed that these pages might confuse
> users looking for a tag.
> 
> He is not totally wrong with that. These pages can be confusing but
> there are reasons why other users (including me) claim that most
> proposals should be kept.

I just realized that in my other reply to this post I didn't address the
question you started with, namely whether tagging proposals are worth
keeping.

I still think that we should not be overly cautious. We should delete
things when in doubt. Otherwise we'll never get the wiki to a manageable
level. But there are things worth preserving. And a discussion about
tagging might be one of those things. If there is real content, people
having different ideas about something explaining their reasons etc.,
then this is valuable. Tag discussions have the tendency to come back up
and often discussions are done again and again because we forget what we
talked about the last time or new people don't have the context. So in
those cases having some kind of history around could be useful. But
there probably are plenty of pages where somebody had some idea that
never got any real discussion, maybe about something that found a
totally different solution in the mean time. Those pages might not be so
important to keep.

So as always you have to look at each case. If a page contains content
that is still useful for our current world, keep it. But if something is
merely interesting for historical reasons then it can be deleted. And
yes, there is a gray area there, but humans can be trusted with these
decisions and the world will not end if occasionally somebody makes the
"wrong" decision. But stalling any progress in the wiki by requiring
discussions about any change is certainly not the right way. Look at
OSM itself, we allow anybody to delete anything there, too, and it seems
to work out mostly.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  https://www.jochentopf.com/  +49-351-31778688