This is my first daylog ever. I also hope it will be my last.
Shanoyu: I disagree with you on so many levels
it's hard to know even where to start. But if you're saying "Who cares?" about E2 editorial policy, then I have to answer that
I do.
To me, and presumably to almost everyone who has
taken
liveforever's Covenant, E2 is not just a game
like
Medievia. Neither is it a social experience:
I never use the
Chatterbox, I don't know anybody
on E2 in real life, and I don't particularly want to.
And neither am I expecting fame or fortune from
my endeavours -- hell, I'd prefer it if people could
not connect "
gn0sis" to my real-life identity,
although I am aware that connecting the dots isn't too
tough and I keep this in mind while noding.
So. Like most factual noders, I think that
Everything is (or at least has the potential to be)
the ultimate encyclopedia, offering all information
from all points of view, hyperlinked to yet more
information. Such a thing would be
immensely useful once it contained even a fraction
of the world's knowledge, and to some degree E2 is
already useful as it is. We factual noders strive
to increase that percentage of coverage, to make
it exponentially more useful. No, I don't node expecting
that my immortal words will be treasured by all and
sundry, my only expectations are that
- the information is there if someone needs it, and
- the factual content of the information will be
retained in any superseding writeups.
That's it. It's not very much to ask for, and nearly always the Management keeps things this way. If it didn't,
I wouldn't be here, but at
Wikipedia or
Nupedia.
And this is why I think unjustified mass deletions are worrisome, in fact so worrisome that they sometimes make me wonder if there is any point
to noding at all.
erevapisces's argument sounds a little overly
paranoid to me -- e.g. one easy reason why only
noder X's definitions were nuked is that it's trivial
to find them with a user search, while going through
the entire Devil's Dictionary by hand would be quite
a job! -- but the total lack of transparency and
accountability in the editorial process bothers
me quite a lot. There have been abuses in the
past (ask DMan1, holloway, Saige, bexxta...) and,
unless they are checked somehow, there will be abuses
in the future. All I can offer are a few suggestions:
- Automatically generated editor logs. This really
shouldn't be that hard to implement, and it would
remove a burden from those valiant editors who keep
such logs by hand.
- Automatic messages, identifying the editor/god in
question, sent when nodes are edited or removed
- A waiting period and advance notifications for
removing nodes with positive reputations
(eg. "This node will be automatically nuked in one week unless you can tell me why it should stay")
- A public forum and/or arbitration process for
discussing editorial policy
Enough for now -- back to lurking.
/chatteroff
1: Yeah, DMan is a complex case, and I know half
his writeups were plagiarized and much of the rest was
flamage. But he still noded some awesome stuff at times,
eg. nearly all the dim sum recipes now indexed
in Chinese recipes --
but before I waded by hand through all of DMan's writeups
in search of them and wrote that node using the
results they weren't accessible anywhere, because DMan's
dim sum metanode had been nuked!