Comment by hollerith
4 years ago
I know what Chesterton's Fence means, but wish you would elaborate a little on how it relates to the policy.
4 years ago
I know what Chesterton's Fence means, but wish you would elaborate a little on how it relates to the policy.
The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said. Your comment implies that they do; in fact, you essentially argue that losing the "save space" excuse is fatal to the policy. You need to understand those policies before you can plausibly critique them. You evidently don't, and your critique is consequently implausible.
So why don't you explain what they do mean instead of these mysterious repetitions of "you don't understand" and references to concepts (Chesterton's Fence) that aren't obviously applicable to what's being discussed.
I'm not sure what's tricky to understand about this: you have to understand why the fence was put up in the first place before you can safely knock it down. That's it; that's the whole fence. If you want to understand Wikipedia's policies, go read them. They're extensively documented. You can't just make up what you think the rationales for these policies are, knock those false rationales down, and claim you've made any kind of actual argument; you're literally just arguing with yourself.
> The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said. Your comment implies that they do;
I assume by "your comment", you mean mine. If so, it does not imply that that was the rationale - in fact, by calling it an excuse, and not a rationale, it implies the opposite - that the real reason is different, and storage space just a (possible) cover.
Because once you remove the storage space excuse, all that remains (besides doxing, copyright, and various legal reasons, which Deletionpedia shows are a small minority of all deleted articles) are various rationalizations on why readers should be kept in the dark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Why_we_ha... explains their reasons (edit: for soft-deleting articles, not for inaccessible history).
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So why don't you contribute something meaningful to the conversation then, instead of vague-hn'ing?
I read their comment differently. I think they were saying the admins can’t even use the excuse that any specific deletions or deletions generally are necessary to save space, because deleted items are not erased completely, but are still available to admins.