Re: Wiki: Remove some outdated pages?

Being new to the list, obviously I defer to the project insiders here, 
and am not urging any hasty solutions… I understand well how quickly 
energetic newcomers tend to flame out. :)

That said, I'm a friend of the slightly-dusty-but-information-rich 
resources that just need a little freshening up — a preservationist by 
nature. I think those unloved articles simply need to be surfaced a bit 
better so that the WikiGardeners[0] can tend to them.

On 4/12/25 13:51, Thomas Lange wrote:
> Keeping old, outdated pages and show them in search results will make
> a lot of users unhappy. Think about you are gettin some search results,
> but when you click on them, a lot of them are flagged "outdated".
Ideally, any "outdated" pages wouldn't stay that way for long, having 
been 1) visibly flagged that way, and 2) collected all together in a 
category. Ideally. This of course isn't a problem that fixes itself just 
*because* the articles are flagged, especially if engagement on the wiki 
is already low.

Do you believe that there are a *large* number of Debian Wiki articles 
so far out of date as to make users unhappy? I don't have insights into 
the dark corners of the wiki, as you all probably do.

There appear to be very clear and good guidelines[1] for marking 
articles as candidates for deletion! I myself signed up for a Debian 
Wiki account specifically to restore and renovate an article which was 
deleted by this process ­­— albeit after a long delay. So I've already 
witnessed that process working exactly as intended; see also [2].

On the topic of excluding pages from search, I agree in principle: 
lower-quality pages are ideally demoted or removed from search. That 
said, I would suggest that CategoryProposedDeletion already addresses 
this in a practical way. More comprehensive solutions are certainly 
possible, but might require "hacking core"; that is, modifying .py 
scripts in MoinMoin other than the designated configuration files.

See also [3], which dates to 2008, but it's the only page I could find 
so far on the Moin wiki touching on similar issues. Putting an ACL on 
outdated pages might hide them from search for most users, but also 
removes them from the sight of the drive-by contributors who are most 
likely to be able to fix them.

--Kevin

[0]: https://wikipatterns.haz.wiki/wikignome
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/CategoryProposedDeletion
[2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2025/03/msg00083.html
[3]: 
https://moinmo.in/FeatureRequests/ExcludeUnderlayFromSearch#Further_Discussion