Archiving wiki pages [was: Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013]

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
> > That page is pretty new. The intention was to consolidate the
> > pre-existing guidelines, but there's a chance that some of the issues
> > you mention are simply bugs that need to be ironed out.
>
> This raises a very important point.
>
> Mairin worked on logo & brand guidelines back in 2006. That was the work
> (I believe that you based this page off.

Those old guidelines were seriously out of date and were desperately
in need of a refresh. We have also been wanting to move the guidelines
off the public wiki for (literally) years. I'm only embarrassed that
it took me so long to get around to it. :)

> And all of the links to her
> work are now broken and point at this page.

Links to our trademark guidelines shouldn't point to our trademark
guidelines? I don't get your point...

> The archive is gone. The
> history is gone.

Not true. All the assets from that page were moved to an archive
section [1] in cloud.gnome.org. You can also still see the history of
that page [2].

> We are losing collected collective wisdom at al alarming rate in the
> GNOME project as people (like myself) become less active and old wiki
> pages get deleted wholesale as we move to new infrastructure and the
> content gets "refreshed".
>
> I don't think this is a good thing, but if it's a conscious decision
> that's one thing. If it's collateral damage and is happening unawares,
> then it's more serious (and consider this to be calling attention to it).

We know that outdated material on the wiki is a serious problem,
particularly for new contributors. I think it's great that things are
getting updated and cleaned out. Valuable material shouldn't be
discarded in the process, of course, but I know I've made an effort to
save anything that looks like it needs saving.

Allan

[1] https://cloud.gnome.org/public.php?service=files&t=a449c85c1f3af0d761eddb018e45388b&path=//BrandBook
[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/info/BrandGuidelines?action=info