Strategic Planning

Proposal:Graveyard (Attic repository for discarded paragraphs)

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

A tool be added allowing a user to view all large pieces of text that have been removed from an article.

Proposal

In a suitable location, probably on the History tab, a link be added to a new page, titled "Graveyard" or something similar, listing all large pieces of text that have ever been removed from the article. Possible implementation: all edit-by-edit diffs (i.e. the ones the "prev" links link to) are consulted; if the diff algorithm states that a paragraph that was removed, that paragraph is added to the graveyard page. Paragraphs are grouped by edit; edits are shown in reverse chronological order.

Maybe AbuseFilter which adds blanking section blanking tags, combined with Filtering out vandalism in edit history, would do.

Motivation

Too many times (i.e. twice), I have seen large pieces of pages removed by vandals and those removals completely overlooked--in one of the two cases, editors simply rewrote the article from scratch, and it never got as far along as it originally was, until the missing pieces were put back. The effect, of course, is that pages regress, possibly for months, in a preventable manner; this proposal would help prevent these regressions.

Key Questions

Potential Costs

Very little; the initial cost would be that of generating the graveyard pages for the first time (quite small, I would think), and maintenance would consist of performing a diff upon every edit (negligible?).

References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Graveyard (Attic repository for discarded paragraphs).

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