Thread: Where did the Wiki instructions for Page Up/Down KeyBindings for MicroB go???
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dneary is offline dneary
2010-09-27 , 09:53
Posts: 263 | Thanked: 679 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Lyon, France
#18
Hi,

Originally Posted by Matan View Post
Here is a great idea:

If you don't understand a page's relevance or usefulness, don't delete it. This wiki is supposed to be about Maemo, not about you.
Note that I'm not saying this happened, but it's definitely a possibility. As the wiki maintainer, I have to think also about the usability of the wiki for visitors. A wiki can't be an unkempt information dump, and some of the wiki pages were just that.

Off the top of my head, I can think of pages like the "Linux" page, which was a 1 paragraph description of what Linux is. I deleted that one. and sometimes, pages which are migrated from itt or the old midgard wiki were either *really* old (I mean, 4 to 5 years old, with no information current for N8x0 users, even, linking to dead repositories, etc). Is it better to leave an increasingly inaccurate page online, spend half a day trying to understand what the author meant and try to update the page so that it's useful, or delete it as unmaintained and mostly useless? Sometimes we (and by "we", I mean "the members of the Maemo community who contribute to wiki maintenance") choose the latter solution.

Why would someone want to work on some page that you will later delete because you do not understand. If the criterion for page survival is that one of a few select people understands it, let those select few write the pages, and not ask other people to waste their time.
That's not the criteria - as you would know if you visited and read the wiki gardners page. Our objective is to maintain the wiki, to ensure that all the information in it is useful to visitors. And unmaintained wiki pages are sometimes not useful any more, and get deleted for the good of the wiki.

Now, let me repeat, I have no *specific* knowledge about *this* particular issue, and am merely explaining how wiki maintenance works *in general* - pages get deleted very rarely, but when they do it is generally because (a) the page was not migrated from another wiki because the people doing the migration could not evaluate its usefulness, or (b) the page was deemed to be (mostly) useless. In this situation, the normal recommended procedure is to extract the useful information, merge it into the most appropriate page, and delete the useless information. Sometimes that means trimming down a page, and sometimes it means merging several pages.

Indiscriminate creation of wiki pages of varying quality & usefulness does not make a better wiki, any more than allowing graffiti inside an art gallery makes a better art resource.

(To repeat, I'm explaining principles here, not speaking to any specific page or incident).

Cheers,
Dave.