Documenting the history of OpenStreetMap

certainly. Imho delete requests (unlike delete proposals) are a very serious matter. Anyone who gets delete requests reversed more than a few times should take a break and have all his requests reviewed. Would you kindly post a list of all pages that you deleted or suggest to delete so other people don’t have to wade through logs of hundreds of pages?

It has been a long time that I ever used {{delete}} and looking back I think I would choose a different path now.

Wrong impression, wrong forum. I did not count all of the delete requests and most discussions are in the mailing lists.

If you got more complaints than other users it may have two reasons: either you make more mistakes or people are simply overwhelmed by the number of delete requests that you made. Either case is a problem that you should try to avoid or you will get more serious complaints.

No, I had the impression that you are exceptionally self-righteous. Most discussions are in the mailing lists, this has been the first time since years that I visited the forum and I will ignore it very soon again.

I don’t they should in this case. Since its only a few people who originally did, along with continue to do, the reversals in the first place and I had more support for the pages being deleted then not. Which you continue to ignore and I’m sick of repeating myself about.

I actually took a six month “break” where I consulted other people about this, who agreed with me, and waited to see if original pages were deleted before I requested more pages be deleted. I even reverted a few of my own deletion requests in the mean time that I thought could have been thought out more or had more discussion. Everyone learns as they go. Even me. I never said there was zero room for improvement on my part or that 100% of my edits were fantastic. Just that the ratio of hate to wrong was way off and that we should figure out some rules so both can be mitigated in the future. I’m not sure why that’s such an issue.

Again, I don’t think the wiki should be ran based on opinions of the few loudest voices in the room. Especially when they are the clear minority. Simply because has someone “has an issue with something” doesn’t really mean anything either. It things should be based on more then outrage. Every opinion should be heard and considered. That goes for everything here, not just in my case. You clearly disagree with that.

No. I’m cool. I rather trust that the admins made the right decision by deleting the pages. Last time I checked they know perfectly well what they are doing. Sometimes better then we do.

Its predictable you would ignore the fact that 99% of the pages I requested be deleted where as evidence that I was in the right though on most of them though. “Ignore the evidence and resort to personal attacks instead (see below)” is a pretty bad tactic in general.

I’m not sure how its the wrong forum to point out that this might not be such a big controversy after all, when your the one that has repeatedly brought it up as a reason for things here, but whatever. I haven’t seen any discussions about this on the mailing lists either. Maybe you could provide a link to the discussions going there and also tell the people there it would be helpful if they joined this discussion so its not spread out everywhere.

Or its a personal thing (or maybe just that the people suffer from elitism). I don’t know why that’s so hard to imagine. You think people on here aren’t prone to personal grudges or any form of bias? Right. Verdy_P totally was. Its pretty easy to look through his talk page and see it. I’ve into to many intellectual disputes with both Polarbear, Mateusz Konieczny, and Nakenar in other places besides the wiki. They generally single certain people and act the same way they did here. I’ve even gotten private messages from other people saying they do the same thing to them. So don’t treat me like I’m making baseless statements with nothing to back it up.

As I’ve said I don’t care about complaints as a metric for anything. Following rules and guidelines are more important. I’ve said throughout this that I’m perfectly willing to talk to an admin or someone from the DWG to. The couple of times they have been involved they sided with me anyway. So I don’t really care.

I’m not sure what’s self-righteous about requested pages be deleted, pointing out that more people were fine with it then not (including admins), that there should be a discussion about so it doesn’t happen again in the future (which everyone benefits from), or me saying that if the people who raised concerned originally really cared they would be participating in the discussion. None of those things are self-righteous. If anything they are the exact opposite.

I could say though that its pretty self-righteous boss someone around on their talk page about something but not help them come up with a solution to the problem. I could also say the same thing about someone who says that if another person doesn’t like how the search on the wiki works, they should just use another search engine (which you did). I’m not going to stoop that level though because name calling is pointless, doesn’t resolve anything, and just makes the person doing it look needlessly petty. Which I rather avoid. There’s enough pettiness around here already.

Btw, I wasn’t including you in the comment about fake outrage. It was in reference to the people who have a constant problem on my talk page over the last couple of years but don’t participate here. I have respect for the fact that your taking the time to participate in the forum. I don’t have respect for you calling me self-righteous or you putting this all on me though.

I thought of an interesting idea: why don’t we move all of the old proposals to the original proposer’s userspace, and remove all of the categories on the pages? That way the categories don’t clutter up, the pages are ignored in the search, and no people would be complaining about deletions.

For example, “Proposed features/business lunch” would become “User:Gutsycat/business lunch”.

Of course, certain proposals with literally no informative content, such as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/employment_agency, can be deleted instead of moved. Also, if the particular proposer doesn’t want their proposal anymore and wants it to be deleted, so be it.

As for the software stuff, why don’t we move it all to the main software page (e.g. delete all of the Kosmos subpages and move their content over to the main Kosmos page)? I know that would make the main pages very long, but does that really matter ;)?

Btw, I did try other search engines, including Google. They all have the same problem. I also did research on how to improve the Wiki search functionality and asked around, but it went know where. So its not like didn’t think of those things or try them. Sometimes pages for tags won’t even show up in the top five and totally unrelated things will instead. Not even proposal pages in a lot of cases. I’ve also heard similar complaints other users. So there’s just something fundamentally broken about how the pages index themselves or something that needs to be worked out. (as a side note, I just realized the search doesn’t even work for finding user pages. That should really be fixed).

That might be an option for the category problem. I think someone suggested it somewhere above though and it was a bad idea for some reason. Although I can’t remember why. I don’t know if it would help with the search issues either though and I still think its worth deleted blank/pretty much blank pages in cases where they can be. Along with having some good guidelines.

I think that’s a good idea for software pages. I don’t think it would make the main pages to long either if the content was summarized and condensed well. There’s already a lot of completely unnecessary words in some pages that can be removed as it is. Plus, I think it would ultimately make things better. Most information about something should be on its main page anyway and people shouldn’t have to dig around to find things if they don’t have to. Especially considering how badly the search works. There’s been plenty of times where I was trying to find information on the wiki and couldn’t. So I just gave up, but then stumbled on it later while reading an only vaguely related article. Plus, a lot of pages are stubs and could use the content.

I have looked through the discussion and concluded that you are by mistake remembering a different idea that was remarked on by Tigerfell, about me moving deleted proposals to my own userspace. Which is a different idea from what I’m suggesting now…

I actually tested it by putting “EzekielT/deleted proposals” (alluding to my user subpage) into the search engine. My user subpage “User:EzekielT/deleted proposals” did not appear, which means user pages are excluded from the general search (unless “User:” is added).

My bad, I thought it was brought up. I guess not. So even better you suggested it then I guess

Yeah, even searching just for EzekielT doesn’t come up with anything besides proposals you have commented on. Not even user talk pages you have commented on. Which is weird. It seems to be excluding anything involving user pages. If you put in just “EzekielT” it should at least forward to your user page though, like it does for tag pages.

I’ll have to find some examples of tag searches that are screwed up also.

This might actually work out to our advantage though when it comes to my idea ;). Since this means that once we move all of the old proposals to the original proposers’ userspaces they will not even show up at all in the search.

It looks to me as the system is configured to search in the “article” namespaces only. This is the configuration https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/blob/master/cookbooks/mediawiki/templates/default/LocalSettings.php.erb#L318. It had to be changed after the addition of Wikibase because there was some issue (just look at Yurik’s talk page explanations. For external search engines, I think to can let them index your user page manually by adding the following on the page

__INDEX__

I dislike the idea of moving proposals to user space for several reasons:

• Proposals would be located at different spots, so you can not use the prefix search when looking for ideas of proposals. (Same applies for removing categories.)

• I feel uneasy about editing pages in user space if not specifically invited by the user.

• Some proposals were set up by multiple users (one created, the other changed it substantially).

• The page moves will create additional discussions or need to be regulated.

I mean, the proposals that could be of use for others and contain more than some trivial content should just stay were they are. Why to you want to change something there?

Because Adamant1 wants pretty much all of the old proposals to be deleted, saying that they are cluttering up categories and searches. Which I agree with. So I found a nice compromise between the opposing sides here. Also a lot of the old proposals that Adamant1 wants deleted that do contain more than some trivial content are 7-11 years old. So a lot of them may contain outdated information. Also, it seems impossible to draw the line between “trivial” and “non-trivial” because Adamant1 and Nakaner, Mateusz, Polarbear, RicoZ, and the others opposing deletions have a clearly different view on what is valuable and what should be kept or not. Not to mention that I’m pretty sure they will continue to revert Adamant1 and do everything they can to make sure the pages aren’t deleted. Which brings us back further into a spiral of chaos. Besides, if we move them all to userspaces, none of the proposals will be deleted. You’ll still be able to look at them (even though it’ll admittedly be harder to search for them).

Honestly, EzekielT as I outlined, I think moving is even worse than deleting or not caring. I set up this thread to define those pages worth deleting. You can find my draft at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Tigerfell/Crafting.

Look at it this way: we have very little choice. It’s a never-ending trap. If Adamant1 deletes the pages, Mateusz and/or Nakaner will revert it. If we keep things how they are, Adamant1 will delete all of them and Mateusz and/or Nakaner will revert again. Then the argument starts again. So I think deleting the pages or keeping them how they are is out of the question, since either action will be reverted or disagreed upon. But if the particular proposal was created by mistake and/or is completely devoid of content, like employment agency, an exception could be made to delete the page (although certain deletion opposers would be against that, particularly Mateusz). Mateusz has, in fact, stated this:

So we’d have to convince them that “deleting is the only option”, which is the exact opposite of what Nakaner, Mateusz, etc. want. Especially considering that Mateusz already doesn’t even want us to delete any proposals, no matter how devoid of content they are. And if we decided not to care and keep things how they are, that wouldn’t be very fair to Adamant1 (or other users who agree that we should delete the pages) either. So we’re stuck in a complete deadlock, with no way to get out of it (other than the idea I described).

I’m afraid there’ll be nothing we can do when it comes to prefix searching, but we could create a new category: “Defunct proposals moved to userspace”, or something like that, which consists of all (and only) the old proposals we moved to the userspaces.

They’re all old, abandoned, or rejected proposals, so there wouldn’t be any real reason to edit them anyway. Unless you’re planning to revive it, but I’d suggest you create a new proposal if that’s the case. Normally the only edits would be to move the page to the userspace, replace all the categories with the category I thought of above, and that’s it.

It isn’t really like the repeated reversions and heated deletion discussions are much better. Adamant1’s opposers would be much more tempered down if we discussed moving pages rather than deleting them, and Adamant1 will be happy because they’ll stop with the repeated reverting and bothering, not to mention Adamant1’s problem with keeping old proposals to begin with (cluttered categories and the search problem) would be fixed. So my idea is a nice compromise between everyone.

Just to be clear, I’m not against all proposal pages. I just think some of them should be deleted for the reasons given here by me and others. Those pages are only a small fraction of proposal pages out there though, all of which I haven’t touched and have zero reason to. but its still helpful to delete the ones we can. Even if they are only a small minority of all proposal pages.

Exactly, that quote is a perfect summary of why this is an issue in the first place. It shouldn’t be an all or nothing thing. Not only is it unfair to me and other users who want pages deleted, its not a good way to run a website in general or even a standard they apply to themselves. For instance see Nakaner’s comment on Lyx’s talk page “I just found Tag:motorcycle friendly=customary and added {{delete proposal}}. I’ll buy some fresh junk food.” Although not a proposal page, it still shows he’s open to at least discussing it other instances besides this one. The whole “I’ll buy some fresh junk food” makes it sound like he doesn’t take it as seriously as he should or did in my case either.

In Polarbearing’s case, he has made it clear that he doesn’t care about or respect the opinions and actions of the administrators. So he probably won’t abide by whatever guidelines we come up with either. If he or anyone else continues to cause problems once we decide on the guidelines, all we can do is report them to admins and the DWG until they back off.

In my own case, I’m 100% willing to follow whatever guidelines we decide on. As long it is based on discussion, consensus, and allows for some instances where pages can be deleted. I think if clear, fair guidelines are decided on that it will mostly be unnecessary to move proposals to peoples talk pages. Since it will give us wiggle room to delete things.

I appreciate the work Tigerfall has put into it and I think the points on his discussion page are all pretty sound. Although there’s a few things that could probably be improved, but I don’t have time to comment on them right now unfortunately. I will later though. In general, some guidelines are better then no guidelines. Even if they aren’t 100% perfect or don’t follow what I want to a tee. I’m just happy its being worked out.

The amount of blow back and resistance to even discussing it that I had to go thorough over the past couple of years to even get it this point was pretty ridiculous though, but it is what it is. I guess

Good luck trying to convince Mateusz Konieczny, Polarbear w, Dieterdreist, or Nakaner to follow through though. Especially Mateusz.

Concerning Polarbear, he has recently become a member of the DWG. Which gives him a powerful key to potential victory for his case.

The good thing about consensus and guidelines is that you don’t have to convince anyone of anything. So once its clearly established that proposals without content can be deleted, there’s really nothing to debate after that in those cases. The person refuting the deletion proposal will also have to clearly state why on the talk page. Otherwise the deletion proposal will stand. See #3 on Tigerfall’s page “A discussion should be initiated by the opposing person on the proposal’s discussion page.” Which I think is fair.

Dieterdreist is at least a little more level headed then the other people you listed. Its my hope that once the guidelines get semi-finalized and announced on the mailing list that more people will come out in support of it when they realize its not an either or thing and that the qualifications for deletion will still be pretty high. I think people like Dieterdreist and some others might be swayed to support it at that point. Although, I could be wrong. I guess we will find out.

That figures. He’ll still have abide by some basic standards of fair behavior though. Maybe even more so now that he is in the DWG. Even if not, Woodpeck said there was instances where even thought pages could be deleted. So its not like Polarbearing is the only voice it or that other members wouldn’t support the guidelines. Personally, I think ultimately its on us as editors of the wiki to work out disagreements ourselves if we can. So for me, contacting the DWG would only be done in cases where that didn’t happen and it would probably go to a mod first.

Polarbearing is still on the same level as us when he’s a normal editor and not working on behalf of the DWG also and he can’t claim everything he does outside of it is in his capacity as a member. So whatever power it might give him, it only applies when he is doing official DWG business.

I wonder who this “we” are? Recently only 3 people we participating in this thread. Are those the 3 people that will decide the guidelines? Where is the larger community consensus for your actions?

In one of the posts above someone mention 4 names, with AFAIK a lot of “OSM” milage", who are against the deletion actions you take.

So sit back for a moment and think whether you are a small group of “rebels” trying to go against established practices or whether you are really representing the wish of most readers/maintainers of the wiki.

IMHO you shouldn’t be thinking about ways to punish people with DWG bans and already enjoying those bans, as that is really childish. If you want to change the wiki, you will have to find a solution that works for the 7 of you.

Obviously the “we” is the community. “We” are all a part of that right?

Maybe you didn’t read my whole messages, or the other ones that mentioned it, but this is just the first step in the process. Anything finalized here will also be discussed and revised in other channels before being implemented. Which has already been stated.

Personally, I’m good. This is something I’ve already put plenty of thought into and discussed with a bunch of other people. So I don’t need to I don’t need to “sit back for a moment” about anything. Other people support this besides just us. I’m not going to through old messages for you, but there’s plenty of users in favor of proposals and other pages being deleted in some circumstances. So if anything the “3 names” (I’m not including Dieterdreist in that) are the “rebels.” You should really read through a topic’s discussion and other things related to it before you ramp up the rudeness to that level next time.

In general, I’m not here to push my agenda and I don’t care about just being right like a lot of other users do. If there wasn’t other people who thought pages should be deleted in some instances, instead of support for it by people who’s voices are being silenced through bullying and other wrong tactics, I would have let this go along time ago. Tigerfall was kind enough to put effort into making a rough draft of some guidelines and doesn’t have an agenda either. I don’t appreciate the insinuation that we do or are just acting alone as “rebels.” Even the most rudimentary websites have some basic standards for things like when pages can be deleted. So I’m not sure why even discussing the topic is such an issue for a lot of people.

Where did I say I enjoy DWG bans or that I would be doing it as punishment? Everyone should follow rules, even me. As I said, reporting people to DWG would be a last resort and that its better to work things out within the community, on our own, when we can. Even so, last I checked anyone can contact the DWG for whatever reason they feel like. The whole purpose in the DWG is to help resolve these kinds of issues. So I’m not sure why it would be controversial or childish to contact them about it. The feelings of the person doing it doesn’t really matter either.

Ultimately this is just about having some basic editing standards and guidelines. That’s it. Anyone can brainstorm or create a draft for something if they want to. I really don’t appreciate the “childish” comment or the whole thing about us being “rebels.” Obviously there’s more to this then you’ve read and all of us put way more thought into it then you insinuate. So neither comment is productive or helpful. Maybe next time skip making them. In the meantime though if you have any thoughts or feedback about Tigerfall’s draft proposal I’d appreciate if you left them on the draft wiki page. The more people give their feedback on it the better. I don’t really care if the feedback agree’s with mine or not.

There’s quite a few topics involved in this thread. In particular: “What should the procedure for deletions be”, “which pages should we delete/keep”, and (assuming we don’t delete such pages outright) “what should the content and structure of pages on old software/discontinued websites/past events/… be”.

Regarding the deletion procedures, I believe that a big chunk of the recent conflict over deletions is the result of a disagreement on what situations {{delete}} and {{delete proposal}} are appropriate for, respectively. My mental model of placing {{delete}} on a page has always been that of moving a file to the trash: While it can still be rescued, you really shouldn’t do that with any page that people might want to keep, because an admin might hit the “empty trash” button a minute later. I also would not have expected admins to do any detailed review of delete requests. Based on this perspective, Adamant1’s behavior struck me as excessively bold: When re-adding {{delete}} to a page where it was already reverted in the past, for example, one cannot in good conscience claim to have assumed that no one would mind.

It makes a bit more sense now to me, given that Adamant1 has quoted the “please explain why on its talk page” phrase that’s part of the template. I do, however, believe that this is in conflict with the instructions in the template documentation, and we need to decide which of them to modify/remove. I’m not yet sure whether we actually need many written rules beyond that, as I feel resolving this point of contention would already solve a big chunk of the issue.

Discussing how “historic” pages should be treated is also important, but as I feel this thread has become too broad already, let me just say, that, in many cases, I feel it would be preferable to update old pages, rather than freeze an outdated revision. For example, a wiki page about an app or site that no longer exists might be changed to the past tense, and one could maybe include a “History” section describing it’s impact on OSM’s history.

The problem is in my opinion that Adamant1 and Ezekiel use {{delete}} against broad consensus. We might try to improve our wiki documentation regarding what and how to delete but I somewhat doubt this will in any way influence the actions of those two users.

I notice that this thread did not even attract the attention of most of the original participants of the “delete war”.

Now you’ve done it, Adamant1 is coming for you…

Maybe you should be more careful with your wording, or else you’ll set Adamant1 off, and when that happens we don’t really get anywhere. Especially considering by saying that you’re making Adamant1 have to relitigate everything we’ve heard already (multiple times ;)).

I don’t really have much of an opinion on using {{delete}} or {{delete proposal}} (except certain proposals that a) have literally no informative content, like employment agency, and b) pages I created that I want deleted). Those pages I use {{delete}} on. It’s Adamant1 who’s a particularly adamant one about using {{delete}} (pun 100% intended ;)). So please don’t depict me as rock solid in my ways or not willing to have a different approach; I already came up with a solution here, that would resolve the conflict on all sides. To move old proposal pages to userspaces. But everyone seems to not be interested in that idea, maybe because people have a hard time trying something new?

I try not to take sides in this “delete war”, so I can be on good terms with everyone, including you and Adamant1. Although I did at one point take everyone’s side, in a weird way (by reverting pretty much everyone in the “delete war”, including myself) which led me to that absentminded mass reversion spree I apologized for (and explained the reasoning behind). That makes me pretty much the only editor in this “delete war” to have both “deleted history” and “restored history”…

There’s also RicoZ who’s been participating in the discussion, now Tordanik too. So 5.

Mateusz knows this thread (and commented here once on page 2) and even though the user is a major participant in the delete war, they’ve decided not to further participate in the discussion, and we can’t force users to be in the conversation if they themselves don’t want to be part of it or aren’t interested. Dieterdreist and Polarbear know about it too, and have made a few comments, but haven’t responded in a while either. So the only major participant in the deletion war who hasn’t replied here is Nakaner.

It’s actually 5, including RicoZ. And there’s also Constantino a while back, so a total of 6.

That’s a bit harsh, Tigerfell isn’t a rebel, the user is genuinely trying to gain consensus, nor am I, Adamant1 isn’t really either, since the admin Lyx deleted most of the ones Adamant1 tagged delete on, and RicoZ is against deletions, so…

As far as I know, the established practices don’t say pages should be kept at all costs with no regard to how devoid of content they are… that would be extreme (and not to mention unreasonable)…

It’s actually 8, and I’ve already found a solution, which I stated above.

Good point. I tried to limit it in the beginning but many of these topics are linked to each other and I had the impression that the others wanted to voice their opinion on all of these topics.

There are tons of ‘technical’ reasons to use delete, like duplicated files, copyright issues of files, licensing issues (I usually forward them to admins), empty pages, broken files, broken templates with no use (creator writes: “sorry it is broken and useless”, I sometimes contacted the people individually), pages like “Please delete…” without the template, empty and wrong translations (e.g. English version equal to Japanese version, and no page history to keep), redirects to deleted pages, automatically created pages containing a template only (I see, you could discuss in this case), content not relating to OpenStreetMap in any way (like private images, Wikipedia-like pages about general concepts like “Publishers”), multiple identical pages (usually changed to redirects), and spam.

Thank you.

Not sure if they are actually interested, but I will contact Nakaner.