Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Digital amnesia (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. No consensus for deletion, so redirect/merge discussions can continue on the talk page. (non-admin closure) Logan Talk Contributions 03:19, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Digital amnesia
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log )

Delete: An essay with some references, vast majority of which is about the concept of digital obsolescence, others just use the term in a flashy way, and many of them have different things in mind. (For example, this arbitrarily added ref discusses the issue of internet links to scientific articles that went dead ("link rot").)

There is no references which actually introduce the concept in an encyclopedic/systematic way. Lorem Ip (talk) 20:36, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Really? Where have you looked?  It cannot have been the several places (e.g. ISBN 9781845447335 pp. 306) that throw up reports of the New Zealand government's throwing some NZD24 millions at the problem in 2004. .  So where did you look?  Uncle G (talk) 21:35, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Did you read the article and my nomination? Citing from the "Australians thinking along the same lines" : But problems arise when reports are removed from the web or relocated to a new website...The Australian Library and Information Services seminar, “Digital Amnesia”, will address issues relating to the access and management of government publications online I.e., they use this flashy word for what has long been known under the ugly term of link rot (the problem even for wikipedia's citage). Lorem Ip (talk) 22:56, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Neither the article nor your nomination say where you looked. I notice that you, even when directly asked, don't say where you looked.  Is that because you did not look for references that introduce the concept?  If not, then where did you look?  You didn't read the whole of the article pointed to, by the way.  It's not all about linkrot.  Read it carefully, all of the way through, rather than just the bits near the part where a WWW browser's find facility finds the (two) words.  Uncle G (talk) 02:59, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I've read it all, both two small pagess. From page two: The loss of old material seems to occur most often where a website has gone through an upgrade, change of staff or change of management, or when a significant project and its attendant publications have come to an end. - Which is about possible causes of what? Link rot again. If I miss something besides variouss panic and political babble, please cite. Also, I don't understand your demeaning tone. I don't have to report my reading habits to you. On the contrary, if you have something to cite about "digital amnesia" which is something other than digital obsolescence, please put in into the article, I will delete or tag various dubious statements, and we will need not to carry on this pointless bickering about who read what and how much. Lorem Ip (talk) 01:23, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Note to Uncle G: Author Caroline Auty uses the phrase "digital amnesia" exactly once in the book you linked to, Politics and government in the age of the internet, Volume 57, page 306. Auty puts the term in scare quotes to indicate that it is either 1) a joke, 2) an unusual construction, 3) a quote from someone else, or 4) she is not using the term like others use it. Her use is not a definitive one—it is a passing one of no importance. What the New Zealand government spent a bunch of money on was a "trusted digital repository". The one instance on page 306 is the only instance of the word "amnesia" in Auty's publication. Binksternet (talk) 02:45, 21 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Redirect to digital obsolescence: I've never heard the term used myself, and a check in google Scholar shows why--it is almost exclusively an Australian/New Zealand idiom.  The concept is real enough, and is known usually as digital obsolescence, though I've seen other names. If there is any unique content here it can be merged, but two phrases for the same thing do not equal two articles.    DGG ( talk ) 22:41, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * See article history; I did so, but I feared the battle with the essay's owner, so I self-reverted and brought it here. Lorem Ip (talk) 22:56, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * So you're wasting everyone's time with a deletion discussion where deletion isn't the desired outcome in the first place, and the ordinary editorial action that you took wasn't even disputed? Good grief!  AFD, one of the highest-traffic areas of the project, has enough daily traffic with cases where deletion is actually wanted, without manufactured non-deletion cases like this.  Don't waste people's time like this.  Uncle G (talk) 02:59, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I am asking you again: did you read my nomination? I posted it for deletion because the article speaks NOT about the things in the liberally listed references. As for "not even disputed", thank you very much; in my short time I have run into a surprisingly large number of people who actively edit a certain article and quickly revert your edits with the sole edit comment "no consensus", so I headed straight to "consensus". You say "dont' waste people's time". I don't see many people frequenting this page here. Or did you mean my time is somehow less valuable than yours? Lorem Ip (talk) 21:38, 20 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.  —• Gene93k (talk) 02:47, 20 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Redirect and merge to Digital Dark Age. The great majority of cites do not have a direct reference to "digital amnesia", and at least one which does uses it in an ironic way. This article is clearly made up out of one Australian seminar and a whole lot of original research. Article sources:
 * http://www.uic.edu/classes/comm/comm200am/teamprojects/MemoryTechnologies/Information_Overload.htm – Unreliable source, simple class notes
 * http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/1155/The_great_digital_information_disappearing_act.html – Jokingly refers to "digital amnesia"
 * http://www.librarylaws.org/taxonomy/term/41 – Link not working for me
 * "Businesses Worry About Long-Term Data Losses" – No mention of topic phrase
 * http://www.chass.org.au/papers/PAP20050718TG.php – Toss Gascoigne's address, "Digital amnesia: the challenges of government online"
 * http://conferences.alia.org.au/seminars/digital.amnesia2005/ – Announcement of above, and links to other presentations at the ALIA conference
 * http://www.sdsc.edu/about/director/pubs/communications200812-DataDeluge.pdf – PDF does not have the word "amnesia" in it
 * http://www.aiim.org/Infonomics/IssueView.aspx?ID=47 – No text on webpage page
 * http://www.physorg.com/news144343006.html – No mention of topic phrase
 * http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/21/tech/main537308.shtml – No mention of topic phrase
 * http://blog.longnow.org/category/digital-dark-age/ – Blog, unverifiable, no mention of topic phrase
 * http://www.lostmag.com/issue3/memory.php – No mention of topic phrase
 * http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ – Generic main page with no direct relevance to topic, no mention of topic phrase, no word "amnesia" found in searching the site.
 * This article is an unneeded neologism fork of Digital Dark Age. What was wrong with that term? Move all the best bits over there. Binksternet (talk) 02:21, 21 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Merge to digital obsolescence, which is a short article on exactly this topic by a less obscure name. The Digital Dark Age article is more about a particle name and concept, rather than the generic problem.  Maybe merge it, too.  Dicklyon (talk) 07:13, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That's a better article to merge to—good suggestion. Binksternet (talk) 14:20, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep: per last AfD. - Ret.Prof (talk) 03:37, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.