[OSM-talk] We're erasing our history in wiki

Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org
Mon Apr 22 06:35:21 UTC 2019


On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 12:03:40AM +0300, Ilya Zverev wrote:
> In my research of API 0.6 (which turned ten years old yesterday) I've
> stumbled on this page:
> 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6/Crowd_sourced_Testing
> 
> It was deleted 7 years ago. And this is a disaster. The page was an
> important milestone in our history: authors, dates, items on it could bring
> some more information on how our current API was rolled out. Nothing is
> left.

It was deleted an yet you have found it. So not a huge desaster after
all.

> Please, could we have a deletion policy in our wiki that clearly states "No
> obsolete pages here", forbidding deletion of anything except spam or
> otherwise harmful pages? Deleting our history is plain vandalism, no better
> than physically destroying pieces of human history displayed in museums.

Isn't that a bit of hype here...

> It's not like we're pressed for disk space there.

No, we aren't. But we are pressed for time and human attention. Of we
had curators who keep important things organized and findable we could
keep things forever. But as it is, all the obsolete crap keeps us from
finding and working with what we need now.

> Thank internet gods for the Internet Archive,

Not the gods but some good people who had a good idea. Let them do their
job and keep the history and lets do our job and keep the momentum in
the project instead of spending our time looking back.

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



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