On May 27, 2009, at 12:10 PM, James Carlson wrote:
Such a thing would have little if any management or maintenance cost,
other than the energy required to keep the bits spinning on rust.
It has to be placed somewhere sensible, it has to be integrated into
the current and future content schema and it must be organised
properly for it to scale well.
Stuff like this has a constant stream of time consuming maintenance,
especially in the volume we're talking about.
There is no such thing as a completely maint-free archive.
There needs to be a firm policy with people willing and able to do
the
job without being hobbled by the fear or encumbrance of having to
take
every action to a committee. Without those, you may as well just have
another fun thread about mailing list subscriptions, wildard
whitelists and spam for all the good it will do.
What you dismissively call a "committee," I'd call either "the users"
or, feeling pompous, "the community."
Well, let me put it this way....as the person who gets the bile when
the infrastructure doesn't work and no notice if it does work, the
hysteria over the removal of the mailing list wildcards has left me a
bit less than enthusiastic about anything that comes with the
'community' contingency and I doubt I'm alone in that particular
pavlovian evasion.
People need to be able to do the job without the fear that one small
change will cause an angry mob to march them to the gallows.
I don't believe Jim said anything about deleting content yet, already,
the hysteria has begun. We're trying to organise what is currently
active and what isn't and will not be again. With all the cruft
hanging about, it says to the casual observer that we don't maintain
the site very well and I think that should bother anyone who cares
about how the site is perceived.
And, yeah, changing something that people in fact are relying on can
be somewhat difficult. Making the policy without getting agreement
from those people sounds like a bad idea to me, no matter how
expedient it might be.
Making a policy at all would be a terrific start but, again, I suspect
talking it to death and arguing the minutiae seems to be de rigueur
for these sorts of things, from what I've observed, which doesn't give
me much hope that it will come soon, if at all and I'm very interested
in getting this mess of groups and lists into some sort of manageable
format.
e.
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