ARCs / unARCs
We deserve better than my half baked proposals!
I'll come back to this after more thought and discussion with others.
For now, I am rescinding this proposal.
ARCs / unARCs
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» Policy & Voting / Policy Discussion
» ARCs / unARCs
Summary:
It's kind of hecked.
While I rather clearly like my own idea, my primary aim here is to get rid of needing a staff discussion and voting thread any time we want to ARC/de-ARC an article.
Edit: I'll be clarifying some points of confusion as they come up here.
Q. What about 049 and 049-ARC?
A. They would be unaffected by this. If, for whatever reason, someone was given permission to rewrite 049-ARC, then the rewrite, 049-ARC-v2, would go up. If 049-ARC-v2 is successful, then 049-ARC would be deleted and replaced with 049-ARC-v2.
This represents a severe edge case that is highly unlikely to ever occur, given the reasons that 049-ARC came to be.
Q. Having only two people move to de-ARC seems small!
A. That's true! To that end, I think that having Rewrite start the de-ARC process and then having the rest of staff vote yea/nae, akin to the deletions process, is a good compromise of flexibility and accountability. The question there is how many votes to de-ARC do we want from staff at large? 5? 10? I'd prefer 5 myself.
Q. Won't this delete all ARCs?
A. That is not the intent of this proposal. The intent is to make it easier to delete insignificant ARCs. There are ~20 that are floating comfortably in deletion range that only exist because they can't be deleted.
Why would Rewrite team have purview over archiving pages that aren't going to be rewritten?
I suggested it because rewrite is, at the moment, the team that is most closely associated with ARC. This is largely because ARCs are older than not, and so most discussions of them fall under the auspices of Rewrite. It's more of a selection effect than a "rewrite handles ARC stuff" mandate.
This would mark a slight expansion of Rewrite's purview. I am not married to this being a rewrite task - I simply suggested it because it is the team that made the most sense.
I am much more interested in this process not requiring all of staff to weigh in for.
I'll be perfectly honest, I am not a fan of this. We are discussing removing a protection for articles who although long ago were accepted and liked, now fail due to the changes in writing conventions and culture of the site. The ARCing process was intended to save these articles because they fulfilled some merit and hopefully rewrite them into a way that could be accepted by the site once again.
I am not completely against removing the protections of these articles if staff feels the need to, but I want to iterate that this is a bigger deal than what I feel is being portrayed. I am also very uncomfortable with this being delegated to one specific team, let alone Rewrite. I fully respect and trust all of the members of rewrite, but a 2/3s majority of Rewrite is quite literally two people.
That is a lot of power for a task that I feel to be an important one. I also do not believe it is such a hassle to have a staff vote for something like this. We already vote for more arbitrary things, and I believe this is something far from arbitrary. If we want to reduce it from two weeks to one week, we could simply place the argument for ARCing/unARCing that article at the top of the voting thread and skip the proposal phase.
As for the proposal itself, I am against the first two points. The final point made I am fine with and would agree to.
I'll be perfectly honest, I am not a fan of this. We are discussing removing a protection for articles who although long ago were accepted and liked, now fail due to the changes in writing conventions and culture of the site. The ARCing process was intended to save these articles because they fulfilled some merit and hopefully rewrite them into a way that could be accepted by the site once again.
To put it bluntly, this has entirely failed.
We delete articles that fall below -10. We summarily delete articles below -20. Why are we granting exceptions to certain articles? Why do those articles hold more historical merit than others? I'm not suggesting we cart blanche delete things. I'm suggesting that we hold ARCs to the same accountability standards we hold all of our other articles.
There are 53 pages tagged with the "archive" tag. 8 of them have a rating higher than +26. This does not strike me as being so historically significant that we need voting activity equal to the promotions process to take care of. http://scpper.com/tags?method=and&tags=%2Barchived
I am not completely against removing the protections of these articles if staff feels the need to, but I want to iterate that this is a bigger deal than what I feel is being portrayed. I am also very uncomfortable with this being delegated to one specific team, let alone Rewrite. I fully respect and trust all of the members of rewrite, but a 2/3s majority of Rewrite is quite literally two people.
That's fair. But as it stands, it requires a majority of staff to delete an ARC'd article. Why? It only requires three staff members to delete an article that's past -10. What transient property of the ARC system makes those articles more important?
I will admit that having two people move to de-ARC something seems small. And I'm perfectly open to having two members of rewrite propose the de-ARCing and then have the rest of staff free to comment on the article supporting or not supporting, with some vote system akin to the deletions process. That'd probably be for the better.
That is a lot of power for a task that I feel to be an important one. I also do not believe it is such a hassle to have a staff vote for something like this. We already vote for more arbitrary things, and I believe this is something far from arbitrary. If we want to reduce it from two weeks to one week, we could simply place the argument for ARCing/unARCing that article at the top of the voting thread and skip the proposal phase.
What are the more arbitrary things we vote on? Again - the median rating of these ARC'd pages is in the single digits, if not negative.
An admission of policy failure elsewhere is not a defense of bad policy here. If we are spending our time voting on more arbitrary things than this, we should also investigate why those other arbitrary things need a time intensive vote.
So, I'll start with my biggest sticking point with your proposal: If we're insisting that archiving as a process still has a purpose in this day and age, something that the existence of archive.org's wayback machine makes me find harder and harder to believe, three members of staff should not have unilateral authority over essentially preventing pages from deletion or deleting pages whenever they want. I don't doubt the abilities of any of these three staff members, but my point is that rewrite is just far too small of a team to have complete control over this.
I'm also not convinced that all of staff voting on a de-archiving or archiving is necessarily a bad policy, especially when contrasted with one team having complete and unopposed control over it. Archiving shouldn't be happening often enough (if at all) that taking a couple of weeks is a problem. However, I'm not entirely opposed to it being decided by a smaller group of staff, if and only if that group is larger than three or four active staff. Does this necessarily mean I want rewrite team to be larger? No, but if people are attached to this being the responsibility of that team in particular and only that team (which I am not), then yes.
There's a couple of things that would make me more inclined to support a single group or team of staff being in charge of (un)-ARCing over the whole of staff, the most notable being if there's a plan to de-ARC a substantial proportion of the articles which have no reason to be archived as soon as a policy is clarified. In that case, it would be a slow and painful process to move this through the whole of staff, so I'd appreciate a mention of whether this is likely to be the case or not. The second would (and the more I think about it the more I like this process) is that the team responsible makes their decision, and makes a discussion thread with maybe 24 hours (as that's the timer on standard deletion votes) for any staff to dissent.
Beyond who is in control of the process, though, I don't have concerns with this proposal. The way to de-ARC an article at +30 has no reason to be different to the one to de-ARC an article at -50, and anything that makes it easier is almost definitely going to be good for the site.
TL;DR: -ARCs shouldn't exist, but if they really have to your policy is generally good. I'm ambivalent on whether it should be all of staff or one team's purview, but any team in charge needs to be bigger than three members and/or there should be something in place to make it possible for any staff with an argument against an archival or de-archival to make a point.
I tend to align with whiteguards viewpoints on this. I can't support removing ARCs given they have historic meaning to the site as a whole.
I think remembering our site history is important, I won't disagree with that.
That being said, I cannot think of a single ARC page that isn't 049-ARC. Not without looking up the "archived" tag.
How do we determine historic meaning and significance? It doesn't seem to be how memorable these ARC'd pages are - I would bet most users can't name a single one other than 049-ARC. And it doesn't seem to be their rating - most of them are in the mid 20s, with a good 20% below deletion range.
If they weren't ARC'd, would we be calling them meaningful? If so, why are we calling them meaningful because they're ARC'd?
I remain completely unconvinced this is actually a problem in need of solving, and particularly unconvinced that moving the problem to an unrelated team is even a net benefit.
I am flatly opposed to permanently deleting an -ARC'd article after it's been rewritten. Those citing the Internet Archive (and to be clear, I am a patron of the IA and donate to it quite frequently) do not understand the inner workings of it and how we could very easily be denied access to our own history down the road, to say nothing of revision history etc.
If I thought the IA was the solution to all our problems I wouldn't have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars in server fees on an archiving system of our own.
There are ~20 that are floating comfortably in deletion range that only exist because they can't be deleted.
Then -ARC is working as intended. Whether the current userbase likes a -ARCed article is frankly irrelevant. We could have a conversation about making them no longer eligible for a rating akin to archived and protected.
We could have a conversation about making them no longer eligible for a rating akin to archived and protected.
I would prefer to have this conversation instead.
I'm going to make a request, as an administrator, for staff to please hold off on these kinds of discussions regarding -ARCs from now on, or at least have them with administrators and other mods in the know. Unnecessary energy is poured into this topic, again and again.
This kind of conversation wells up every few months and always, always comes to a standstill with zero progress. We don't need another event like this thread to happen again.
I'm interested in pursuing the removal of their ratings, creating an -ARC class like the -Protected class (a function I personally initiated in response to trolling). In practice it'll prevent any and all voting on -ARCs. I can't imagine a proposal would be too difficult, so I'll throw something together for next week.
But as it is, -ARCs (and Decomms, unless those were destroyed without my noticing or remembering) aren't going anywhere, they're always going to be a part of Site History, and there's no appreciable positive boon to their unilateral removal.
[This is not a callout post, it's me being personally tired of having to argue for -ARCs and their significance, however minor, to the site as a whole].
Anyway keep an eye out next week for a basic proposal like the one I indicated above.
/forum/t-13860390/arcs-unarcs#post-
