Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-07-04/Cobwebs

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(Almost) All the edits are there. However many are only available to gatekeepers. And many more are not easily findable, or useable. We really need a finding aid. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 14:48, 4 July 2024 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: - yes, I left out a few thing about non-flammable manuscripts on Wikipedia. Many are not easily accessible to non-admins, some are not easily accessible to admins, and I think a very few are burned intentionally, perhaps for legal reasons. But there are at least a couple of exceptions to these exceptions, e.g. some controversial things on Wiki are intentionally saved by Wikipedians before deletion. So, deleted articles are hard to access for non-admins. But I've been told that I can ask an admin to send me a copy of a deleted article if I have a "good enough reason" that's not just a "fishing expedition." But there are off-wiki records as well, e.g. archive.org. If you have an article url or name, you can see what they have on the Wayback Machine. There are data dumps from long ago. There's an exception for "bonafide researchers" (I should really check out this exception).

Probably the biggest category of missing stuff is deleted articles, but AFD records are easily available so at least you can find out why they were AFDed, when, and how many times, quite often with a description of the sources.

But nobody said that "remembering everything" is easy.

I think a lot of people would just be happy with a good indexing system, even if it is incomplete. Basic Wikipedia search does some of that, and indexing is the type of thing that will get better in the future, even for old records.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:21, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

@Smallbones: I think your first paragraph refers to the "researcher" user access level? ☆ Bri (talk) 17:24, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

@Bri: An access level so infrequently used, there are between 3 and 0 people who currently hold it, and less than 10 who have ever held it!

(WP:RESEARCHER and Special:ListUsers/researcher both agree that there appear to be 0 users with that access level, currently, though it's possible I'm just not allowed to see them. Whereas meta:Research:Special API permissions/Log lists 9 people who've ever been granted that right. Six were 2011 summer-program participants with short-term access long since revoked. The other three reportedly have indefinite rights since 2010, 2015-06, and 2015-09. But they may be performing their research somewhere other than enWiki. At least one of them, FaFlo, mentions working with Wikimedia Germany in the RENDER research project. #WhateverThatIs) FeRDNYC (talk) 13:38, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

But nobody said that "remembering everything" is easy.
— Smallbones

Heck, you won't even catch me saying it's desirable. (Even Wikipedia embraces the right to be forgotten... to a limited extent.) FeRDNYC (talk) 01:13, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

• I'm not saying that this should be the case, only that it often is. It's a bit of a warning - if somebody writes something on the internet, it can show up anytime - probably at the worst possible time. So don't write something on the internet if you'd be embarrassed seeing it in a prominent place. I guess I've been thinking about this lately because in the last 12 months I ran into a huge database (from a tipper who may not have known what it was). It wasn't all usable, but much of it could be verified. My immediate reaction was "why did anybody put this on the internet?" I can imagine some of their reasons, but I can imagine many more why they would never want anybody to see it. So it is worthwhile letting Wikipedia editors know that Wikipedia tries to keep everything they write here, and it pretty much works. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:40, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
• Also, the developers and sysadmins have always made clear that they do not guarantee the long-term availability of deleted revisions. In practice, it looks like the oldest visible/restorable deleted revision is from the end of 2004 ([1]) (I checked, and that revision is still visible and could presumably be undeleted), so many of those from the early days are lost as well, and it's possible more could be. And oversight really did used to be a "hard delete"; it was only later on that it was made into the "superdelete" that we know it as today. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 20:33, 8 July 2024 (UTC)