User:Al83tito/Historiography and archeology

Historiography and digital archeology of Wikipedia

long-term preservation historiographical value

Article half-life

Chesterton's fence


 * keep a summary of the talk page history, for significant past deliberations. So past decisions are more easily visible to future editors. That does not preclude future editors from making new decisions, it just shows when a mater has already gone through past deliberation.
 * One example of making inroads in this direction, is Perennial_proposals



Propose a principle, that leads to some new policies or tweaking of exisitng ones, as well as tweaking or adding new features.

How a past generation of wikipedians can effectively communicate their decisions and their reasons behind them, so that future generations of wikipedians, without being constrained by past decisions, can be informed by past decisions and give them consideration Chesterton's fence

Wikipedia's foundational spirit is to allow new consensus to emerge as the community evolves. Very to no few rules at all are written in stone. We do have principles, though, and those do have a more long-lasting characteristic.

So while Wikipedia is meant to allow editors at any given time to come with new consensuses, and to make or change policies and guidelines, there ought to be a guiding principle as expressed in the Chesterton's fence "_____".

Before someone comes and changes the status quo, they owe it to past generations who put the thought and effort to develop something, to understand why. But just like future

But this should be a reciprocal duty: for future generations to examine past decision making before changing things, but also for past generations to find an effective way to communicate the decisions taken, to future generations.

-- --please add your own ideas as bullet points below an issue, or list a new issue, or deliberate in the Talk page about reframing an issue. Things already addressed:


 * Link rot: addressed with archive links, plus having bots archiving and adding the info to the references.
 * history page:


 * Adding more aids to history pages. In part to ameliorate issues related to Pruning article revisions
 * early on we could make an assumption if most, if not all, of the articles in Wikipedia have one or more good faith and reasonably skilled editors that care about it, and keep an eye on it. As Wikipedia ages and grows, an increasing number of articles will stop having a community of editors to back them up. We need to consider how to deal with that.

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 * creating "Saved" versions of times when an article was deemed of high quality. Perennial_proposals

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 * When making changes to the syntax, deprecating templates, etc., have in mind a roadmap/plan for how to adjust all articles

Questions:
 * Consider this: an article about a film from 1990. It had plenty of press coverage, establishing its notability. But it is not a film that sources may write about 100 years from now. In a 100 years, would the article be considered unallowable because it uses only sources from a 100 years back (IF this would be considered original research). Or, would an existing article be grandfathered as written in a time when the research sources were contemporanoeous, and allowed, but if the article were to be created in 2090 it would not be allowed?
 * clarify original research policy: what is original research? Are old sources, even when secondary, considered original research?


 * Michelin three-star restaurants in Holland. It is the goal of a wiki user to create an article for all of them. At some point no one may care about these articles. What happens to them?
 * Some articles may have a perennial significant following of editors. For example, the article on cancer. But for many others, the active editorial interest will wane.


 * old user accounts (deceased): especially easy to vandalize because there is the least chance of someone monitoring an account of a deceased user. Could the answer be to protect them?
 * Template:Deceased Wikipedian


 * Project pages, proposal pages, history pages... All of the backend of wikipedia that becomes inactive
 * Template:Historical
 * WP:HISPAGES"A historical page or process is one which is no longer in use, or is no longer relevant or consensus has changed about its content. They are kept as a record of past Wikipedia processes to give context to historical discussions and to inform future discussions on similar topics."


 * [[Wikipedia:Historical archive]
 * History of Wikipedian processes and people
 * Template:Automatic archive navigator


 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deceased_Wikipedians/Guidelines

-- -- there is already an innate desire in wikipedia and wikipedians to preserve all human knowledge. However we do tend to focus on the knowledge of the "outside world". As Wikipedia ages, it itself becomes a historical artifact worthy of study. in each edit in the history page becomes akin to strata to geologists: by studying each layer you get to study the past and what the world looked like back in different moments in time. Likewise, the discussions and deliberations by editors in coming with decisions to policies and guidelines, the userpages themselves, all become increasingly worthy of study as they age. And because they have historical value, we ought to preserve them in a well-organized manner that facilitates future generations to peer back in time to see And just like organisms go through mutations that change their characteristics, so does wikipedia through its deliberations, shape and change its policies and practices.

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 * create an info article about data preservation in wikipedia.

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Recentism and "this is not an existing problem" vs. long term view and anticipating issues and solutions.

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have a separate thread on addressing Article half-life.

-- Do a review on deletionism, and purging of idle pages (sandbox pages), and the status on of preservation vs deletion of project pages/task forces/portals. -- all edits preserved in history page, except for those removed individually due to copyvio or other concern.

-- idea: a graph on top of the history page that shows the volume of edits over time (similar to the volume of trades in a stock), with also an indication of the quality level given to the article over time (see how it fluctuates). Ideally have the ability to click at any point in the graph to show a version of the article at that moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GreenC https://mako.cc/academic/shaw_hill-laboratories_of_oligarchy-DRAFT.pdf ---
 * A navigation system to more easily "travel back in time" on how an article looked previously.
 * Highlight some key moments/milestones of the article's history?

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 * What happens to articles (for example on a book, a film) where the editors a long gone, as well as any article watchers? As wikipedia grows in size of articles, and some articles get old, not all will have some active supervision. Should there be some special level of protection on those to avoid vandalism that would be harder to detect?
 * How to archive/preserve well the "backend" of Wikipedia; the discussions, the essays, user pages, the evolution of policies... that would be of interest to digital anthropologists in the future?

Example of keeping track of discussions on policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Gender_identity#Discussion_timeline

Template:Historical

WikiProject_Council/Guide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Project_namespace#How-to_and_information_pages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Historical_archive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Delete_unused_username_after_90_days

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Not_around

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Project_namespace#Historical_pages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_reform