Many Linden Lab employee's wiki user pages are being deleted.

[ChuckBaggett1488303079]

According to tweets from @Oobscure, many Linden Lab employee's wiki user pages are being deleted. Philip Linden's page is said to be among the deleted pages.  They are still Google's cache at present, says @Oobscure.

Linden Lab has never shown any respect for the history of virtual worlds.

[Canoro Philipp]

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User: Philip_Linden

why would they be doing this? to save hard drive space?

this should have been kept for historic reference

at least we still have the graveyard, where they are still gonna be remembered

[Perrie Juran]

Interesting.  I did look at the Google cache for Philip's page and it could have used some updating.

But more interesting, according to this page, http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Linden_Lab_Employees , there are only 11 employees who still  have a wiki page. 

Is there a coup going on at the labs?  If so, I hope it is non-violent and that no Avatars get derendered in the process.

[ChuckBaggett1488303079]

A hat tip to the early Linden Lab staff : Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard, Robin, and Ryan.

[Canoro Philipp]

this post is for historical reference:

how the Linden Employees page looked in may 5 2011

 

[Argus Collingwood]

 

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ChuckBaggett wrote:

According to tweets from @Oobscure, many Linden Lab employee's wiki user pages are being deleted. Philip Linden's page is said to be among the deleted pages.  They are still Google's cache at present, says @Oobscure.

Linden Lab has never shown any respect for the history of virtual worlds.

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I thought they were moving Wiki stuff to the new format? Either they will appear in the New Knowledge base or we will need to look at their my.profile pages.

 

[ChuckBaggett1488303079]

Might be. I'm not up on what's going on with the wiki. There is not likely to be a My.Profile page for former employees.

[Peewee Musytari]

Rand said at the last CTUG meeting that he was going to be cleaning up the wiki over the next couple of weeks. I thought he meant updating the wrong info and fixing broken links, didn`t think he meant this sort of clean up

[Void Singer]

they're wiping out outdated and no longer relevant  information.

the whole thing is begining to feel like urban renewal... quicker to tear down the old crap than to fix it up.

 

yeah it totally breaks with wiki culture, but I do see the point of some of it. there was a lot of cluttered mess in there. I am concerned about some of the information that is still relevant being wiped, but not so much about office hours notes about things that don't exist or are already dealt with, not so much.

[Solar Legion]

It's a wiki .... owned by a corporation. There's nothing in it that is truly "historical" - unless you count truly outdated information concerning employees who no longer work for Linden Lab and/or information on Sims that have since been shut down and/or other truly outdated information as such.

It's their wiki. They decide what information to keep and what information to discard: Period.

[Void Singer]

on the converse side, ALL of it is historical, showing changes in policy and structure, projects that succeeded or were abandoned, etc ad nauseam.... just because it's their wiki doesn't negate our concerns on loss of information, some of which was rather useful, and a large portion of which is user generated.

as a for instance, with all the shuffling and deleting comparative listings for things you can and can't do with region of different types has been lost, which was very useful information for scripters trying to detect those differences.

articles and information on effective methods to accomplish tasks has been wiped out (including Kelly Lindens collected notes and links on making inworld http-in services useable for more than plain text) and while my own focus is technical, it appears that various pages on SL culture and behavior have gotten trashed in the process as well. Obscure notes on policy that are still relevant have disappeared as well, and while I agree they should have been better located, deletion means there is no retrieving them unless you happen to know exactly where they were to try and fish them out of google cache or some other wayback-machine type of service.

ETA:
Kelly was smart about it and beat them to the punch, by moving his own content to an archive page before blanking it, as can be seen and thankfully still found by the history tabs.... most other pages were not so fortunate

[Solar Legion]

Actually Void .... If anyone was truly concerned about the information - and truly believed it was historical - a backup would have been made elsewhere by now.

Frankly, I saw something like this coming eventually. PR issues, data cleanup ..... The Wiki was going to have information deleted eventually.

Personally? The only "historical" information concerns the origins of Second Life and its progression out of Linden World.

Technical notes, Town hall meeting notes/transcripts, Linden profiles .... All of that is information that should have been mirrored elsewhere by the users and former/current Lindens.

[Void Singer]

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Solar Legion wrote:

[...] Technical notes, Town hall meeting notes/transcripts, Linden profiles .... All of that is information that should have been mirrored elsewhere by the users and former/current Lindens.

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while I'm sure LL agrees with you, I find the suggestion more than a bit silly. The whole point of having a wiki is to gather related content in one searchable and central resource location, never mind that even after the serial deletions the wiki is huge, or the fact that a fair amount of it is/was marked as illegal to copy, and only allowed to link to (making any public mirror liable for any of that content), or even how quickly mirrored content becomes out of date in a live and evolving information resource like a wiki, adding large time and resources factors for mirroring.

in my experience no one expects mass wiki deletions, it's just not how wiki's normally work. Further more we weren't told they were going to go through and wipe out pages, just that they were going to "clean up the information on some pages"... I expected that some pages that no longer had any relevance at all might disappear, be merged, or redirected. I certainly didn't expect the level of wholesale content gutting that occurred, or I myself would have tried to save some of it and sift through what I could for at least technical data. but even that would be a monumental task given that as a user I would have had no way of knowing in advance which articles where facing deletion until a large number disappeared before I got to them.

I don't argue that it's their resource to do as they please with, I do argue, that with the mass of user donated time effort and content, some consideration for that should have been applied, and interested parties made aware so that relevent information could be preserved

[Perrie Juran]

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Void Singer wrote:

I don't argue that it's their resource to do as they please with, I do argue, that with the mass of user donated time effort and content, some consideration for that should have been applied, and interested parties made aware so that relevent information could be preserved

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Well said.  Without the work of the Residents SL would be a nightmare to learn or would be very expensive because ALL support would then fall on Linden Lab.  90% of what I know about building and navigating this World  I have learned from other residents.  

The other thing is while there may be some very obviously obsolete content, I wonder if SL has gotten like MS Windows.  That there is really not any one person who understands the whole of it.  To my understanding, Torley doesn't code anymore.  He does produce awesome videos and tutorials to teach us how to use the tools as they are implemented.  But that is the GUI he is showing us, not the engine under the hood.

Once information is lost it can take a monumental effort to recover it.  It sounds like someone is really gutting the house.  That housekeeping is needed there is no question.  But it should not be done in haste.

[Void Singer]

good news and bad news

good news first, Rand has offered to restore some pages by request, as per this notice.

bad news, you'll have to make an educated guess as to whether a page had content that needs archived/reviewed, I do NOT suggest sending him the whole linked list as I doubt he'd find it very funny, and he has made efforts to relocate information to pages that are current (so if you see a page that might have important info, check by searching to see if it was already inserted into another page)

the possibly worse news... there are several pages marked "(Obsolete or disallowed information re: LL)" in the deletion log, and unless I miss my guess requests for those pages (mostly Linden staff user pages) will be ignored... My guess is that this is due to a privacy policy change for Linden staff, or may be related to former staffers inability to have those pages removed (since their Linden accounts would have been deactivated)