

A Scorched Data Policy Is Bad for Web, Bad for History - louismg
http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/06/scorched-earth-data-policy-is-bad-for.html

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sp332
Apparently those deletionists never met a real historian. I mean, not a
history teacher, but a person who does research, either in the field or in the
"stacks". You might have thought nothing of the deletion of Geocities when
Yahoo killed it, but you can do real history with that stuff :)
<http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/> for example.

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bediger
I think you're missing something. Without wholesale deletion, we can't
construct The Grand Truth about our past, like the textbooks in Junior Hi and
High School "social studies" present to us.

Without mass deletion, anyone, absolutely anyone, can go look at the
_unchanged_ _unedited_ primary sources. No interpretation by High Priests of
History, the ones who write the simplistic pablum in school textbooks
necessary. That's the kind of thing that causes reformations, and we don't
want one of those, any more than we want another Watergate Scandal.

~~~
sliverstorm
Was that sarcasm, or are you wearing a tin-foil hat?

I mean, not to say Junior High history books are 100% accurate, but really?

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wccrawford
I'll save you guys some time. The answer is "Because you might one day want
that data."

... Duh.

He completely neglects all the positives gained from looking to the future,
instead of at the past. He doesn't even try to address any of them.

~~~
louismg
He being me. Looking at the future is great. Deleting the past isn't
necessary.

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sliverstorm
Bad for history maybe, but I liken this sort of thing to personal email
archives.

I find that if I don't cull aggressively as email comes into my inbox, I wind
up with an archive that is not only huge and unwieldy, but full of stuff I
will almost CERTAINLY never need to read again. Unless you are a god with
regular expressions, the best time to clean up archives is _as you are making
them_ , rather than a hundred years from now when the archive has eclipsed
available storage capacity.

Archiving stuff is great, but I try to stick to discarding the useless, the
mediocre, and the pretty good, and only saving the remarkable, notable, and
fantastic.

~~~
louismg
This is understood, assuming your personal email is posted to the Web and
consumed by others. I am a compulsive email saver, but periodically wipe out
categories that are no longer relevant as well.

