Being new to the list, obviously I defer to the project insiders here,
and am not urging any hasty solutions… I understand well how quickly
energetic newcomers tend to flame out. :)
That said, I'm a friend of the slightly-dusty-but-information-rich
resources that just need a little freshening up — a preservationist by
nature. I think those unloved articles simply need to be surfaced a bit
better so that the WikiGardeners[0] can tend to them.
On 4/12/25 13:51, Thomas Lange wrote:
Keeping old, outdated pages and show them in search results will make
a lot of users unhappy. Think about you are gettin some search results,
but when you click on them, a lot of them are flagged "outdated".
Ideally, any "outdated" pages wouldn't stay that way for long, having
been 1) visibly flagged that way, and 2) collected all together in a
category. Ideally. This of course isn't a problem that fixes itself just
*because* the articles are flagged, especially if engagement on the wiki
is already low.
Do you believe that there are a *large* number of Debian Wiki articles
so far out of date as to make users unhappy? I don't have insights into
the dark corners of the wiki, as you all probably do.
There appear to be very clear and good guidelines[1] for marking
articles as candidates for deletion! I myself signed up for a Debian
Wiki account specifically to restore and renovate an article which was
deleted by this process — albeit after a long delay. So I've already
witnessed that process working exactly as intended; see also [2].
On the topic of excluding pages from search, I agree in principle:
lower-quality pages are ideally demoted or removed from search. That
said, I would suggest that CategoryProposedDeletion already addresses
this in a practical way. More comprehensive solutions are certainly
possible, but might require "hacking core"; that is, modifying .py
scripts in MoinMoin other than the designated configuration files.
See also [3], which dates to 2008, but it's the only page I could find
so far on the Moin wiki touching on similar issues. Putting an ACL on
outdated pages might hide them from search for most users, but also
removes them from the sight of the drive-by contributors who are most
likely to be able to fix them.
--Kevin
[0]: https://wikipatterns.haz.wiki/wikignome
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/CategoryProposedDeletion
[2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2025/03/msg00083.html
[3]:
https://moinmo.in/FeatureRequests/ExcludeUnderlayFromSearch#Further_Discussion
