The difference here being that it is not a professional system. If you mess with the crowd the crowd does not generally go where you prefer it to, it goes home. Other potential contributors see what has been done, and decide not to waste their efforts where outsiders can throw their work away. (outsiders meaning people not from the project that is being closed). Preserving as read only in another place is far more acceptable and indicates respect for one's efforts, even when times have changed. Internal deletion, change and general editing is a completely different issue. It is a given when you start. It is implied by CC-by-sa licence. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andy Mabbett Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2019 6:50 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Supporting Wikinews [was: Reviewing our brand system for our 2030 goals] On Wed, 17 Apr 2019 at 15:31, Peter Southwood <peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote: > Abandoning a project and shutting it down sends a message to all volunteers > that their work could be similarly abandoned and lost one day. For some value of "lost" - it's likely, in this case, that all the content would be preserved, either by making the wiki read-only, or perhaps migrating articles to, say, Wikisource. Sure, things like some portal pages, templates and categories might be discarded, but that can happen to the work of any of us, on any project, anyway. We have a related, but different, issue at Wikispecies .Technically at least, that project is now (or could soon be, with a few tweaks) wholly redundant to Wikidata, and could be populated using Listeria-like scripts or templates, from what is held in Wikidata. The Wikispecies community vehemently resist this, and respond with suggestions that data in Wikispecies (held in a variety of templates, as well as much unstructured prose) should be what is edited, and should be used in a reverse of the above process to somehow magically populate Wikidata. So we continue to maintain versions of the same data on two (or more: Wikipedias and Commons also do their own things with biological taxonomy) vastly different projects, diluting the impact of all of our volunteer-hours. Anyone who commissioned a system like this in a professional capacity would be sacked for incompetence. -- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
