ReplaceWithSkeleton

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As wiki pages (and groups of pages) grow, they tend to do so in a somewhat haphazard way. Collaboration splits off down unexpected avenues, issues are raised and then re-raised later on by someone else, and so forth. Often you end up with an unfocused page that is crying out to be reworked into something better, and yet it would be a lot of work to completely re-organise it while preserving all the existing content.

This inertia of very large pages which resist any attempt to rework them is one of the more frustrating ReworkingProblems - you can see its effects in UseRealNamesRefactored here on meatball wiki. These swamps become permanently inhospitable, if you refuse to lower your standards below ReplaceWithDocument.

Therefore, blow all the existing content away, and replace it with a skeleton for a new, better organised page. If you have a full VersionHistory, drop a link to the prior version somewhere, otherwise save the old text at ...Archived and mark it DeletedPage. Then folks can come together and slowly move good stuff from the old version into the appropriate place in the skeleton, in a BarnRaising style, where appropriate. More importantly, they can add newer content, inspired by the wealth of prior discussion, that helps move the topic along a little.

An extreme CommunityOverContent version: automatically delete a page when it has been edited a hundred times. Now you get to build it all over again, and isn't that the fun part?

: I thought of something similar recently, a kind of SurgeProtector. It uses StableCopy. If a page is edited more than x times without ever going stable (i.e. more than x edits each less than a day from the last one), blow away the current version, revert to the StableCopy, and ban edits to that page until it's finally left alone for a day. (Meta: Wrote this up at PeriPeri:StabiliserThrottle.) -- ChrisPurcell

See OpenMeatballWiki for more on ArchivedPage?s that should be refactored out.

CategoryReworking

ReplaceWithSkeleton

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