Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/Wikibooks:Hierarchy naming scheme

Hierarchy naming scheme‎
I know that normally obsolete and rejected policies are kept around for there potential to have some historical value and because people may decide to update and propose them again. However I think this one should be deleted. People have over time been updating it to reflect changes in the name of books linked to rather than to propose changes, and this has made understanding past intentions nearly impossible which means there is no historical value in keeping it around either. Additional thereA is Naming conventions and Naming policy which reflect some of what is discussed in that page, and both could be used as a starting point to propose any future changes. --dark lama  11:01, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Symbol delete vote.svg Delete. Why would anyone propose changes to a policy that's been superseded? Sorry if I changed the meaning; you should have undone my edits. But my opinion in general is that Hierarchy naming scheme and Naming conventions should both be removed in that they distract from Naming policy.  If changes are proposed, there's the /Unstable option.  A reasonable person would start from what's been agreed upon, not what's been outright rejected. – Adrignola talk 12:33, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I was initially going to just undo you, but looking further other people seemed to have made similar changes, and I think as a result any historical significants of the page has been lost with time and to the point that what to undo and not undo isn't clear any more. Why would anyone propose changes to a policy that's been superseded? Perhaps to turn a superseded proposal into a new proposal that takes into account the current policy as well as things from the old policy that the proposer feels was lost and should be policy again. To give an example, every once in awhile someone suggests that ":" should be used instead of "/" to separate book and chapter names, so some day someone might eventually decide to update and proposal that Naming conventions be the policy again. --dark lama  13:00, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * If it were anything else, I could see that. But the technical operation of the wiki uses / as a delimiter, so there's no possibility of anything else doing the same. – Adrignola talk 13:22, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I regress, but there are plenty of other language editions of the wikibooks project out there where that hasn't stopped them from using a different system. --dark lama  13:35, 19 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Symbol oppose vote.svg Oppose I think the first contribution I ever made to the larger Wikibooks community was in digging up, as context for a current discussion, some comments that were on talk pages of project pages being kept "only" for historical purposes.  I remember thinking, wow, this is one of the great things about these wikis, that you can always reconstruct what went on.  Deleting this would needlessly create a hole in the historical record, to trip up users in the future.  As for subsequent edits, well, serious historical reconstruction involves going though the page history anyway, not just looking at the current version, but we probably should do some reverting to clean it up.  --Pi zero (talk) 15:45, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you have any suggestions of how to correctly reconstruct that page? I proposed deletion, because I think correctly reconstructing that page for historical purposes wasn't possible. I think reconstructing will unavoidably lead to some lost of whatever historical significants the page was suppose to have. --dark lama  15:59, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't a history merge serve to preserve it? (Selecting the oldest page as the history to be "fixed", and move it if needed) --Panic (talk) 17:47, 19 July 2010 (UTC)


 * History merge would seem to me to somewhat degrade the historical record, by making it hard to sort out what was what.


 * The deletion idea seems (perhaps I'm misunderstanding?) to be based on the premise that the historical value of a page is contained entirely in the form of its current version. It seems to me that an important part of its historical value is in its revision history (and all the particular revisions in it), and the revision history of its talk page and all the particular revisions in that, all of which can be coordinated with the Special:Contributions records of the users involved, and the revision histories of the other pages they were editing at about the same time, and the Special:Contributions of other users who show up in those revision histories, etc.  The more of the record is intact, the more it's possible to reconstruct what was going on.


 * Darklama, you said that correctly reconstructing the page for historical purposes didn't seem possible, because reconstructing would unavoidably lead to some loss of whatever historical significance the page was supposed to have. I don't see what you mean.  Could you elaborate, somehow?  --Pi zero (talk) 18:57, 19 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm not talking about just the current revision. What is the purpose of historic preservation to you? To me the purpose is to help people understand history as it was experienced by the people at the time. What is the purpose of reconstruction to you? To me the purpose is to attempt to uncover what has been lost to time by examining what hasn't been lost for clues. How do you think reconstruction would happen for pages? To me that is done by examining the page history and revisions for clues to what was intended. The issue I'm stuck on is how far back is too far or not far enough in order to change the current revision in ways that allow people that want to look at it today to experience what people were considering doing at the right point in time. --dark lama  20:18, 19 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It sounds as if getting the current revision right is in fact an incidental detail to you, as it is to me.


 * As I described above, I'm thinking, in significant part, about wikiarcheology. Piecing together a picture of what was going on by comparing various revision histories and contribution histories (not just by looking at a single page, or even a single page with its revision history, in isolation).  For that sort of research, creating a hole in the historical record seems anti-wiki.  Part of the wiki spirit is being able to go back as far as one is willing to dig; and wikiarcheology is merely digging farther than usual.  It also feels to me very like book burning, creating the same feeling in the pit of my stomach as when I hear about libraries quietly incinerating their collections of old technical journals.  --Pi zero (talk) 01:15, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * per Darklama and Adrignola. Diego Grez (talk) 00:05, 21 July 2010 (UTC)