Why LL Should Be Careful When Deleting History

As revealed by Tateu Nino, a number of pages have been deleted from the official Wiki, plenty of staff users pages have gone along with transcripts of office hours. Exactly what happened I don’t know, although Linden Lab are working on the wiki, deleting so much history seems rather painful to me, a geeky guy who has read plenty of old forum threads and information on Second Life from a time before I arrived here.

However what I find most disappointing is that I don’t think the guys at Linden Lab understand that people like me love reading old transcripts and forum posts, as exemplified by Rand Linden’s reply to Qie Niangao on the issue of the Wiki deletions:

“Qie – I don’t believe we removed anything of historical value”

Everything, absolutely everything, has historical value, whether you feel it’s worth preserving for posterity or not is another matter, but everything has historical value.

So why would Linden Lab do this? I don’t think there’s any malice at all, they are working hard to make the Wiki more relevant, that’s the purpose of this exercise but if Linden Lab want to delete old content then how about inviting us to grab that content and save it ourselves, give us a period of time to collate what we feel might be important and then press delete?

There has been a rumour that the visitor whiteboard has been removed from Linden Lab HQ, the more likely explanation is that it has been moved, but the rumour was that it was being taken down. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, the visitor whiteboard is basically a whiteboard that visitors sign, it looks like this:

That image is from a post by Hamlet Au on New World Notes from 2008 and is reproduced here after seeking permission from Hamlet to post it, if you want to use the image yourself, you must seek permission from Hamlet Au. However the board in itself is a piece of Second Life history, but a board is a bit harder to file away than a Linden Staff page on the wiki.

The thing is, it’s not as if Linden Lab are completely oblivious to the history of Second Life, indeed they have a page about it! All I really want is for the chance to save some of those old office hour transcripts for myself if Linden Lab decide to delete them, I’ve never been a fan of chat logs and find them ripe for comments being taken out of context, but I’d rather have comments being taken out of context than no record of those logs at all.

I would prefer if Linden Lab moved, rather than removed pages, maybe that’s too problematic or hard to manage, after all Linden Lab pay for the storage of that documentation, but at the very least Linden Lab should be careful of what they delete, one man’s junk is another man’s awesome archive.