Is it possible to increase freedom in the Fedora project?

Ask Fedora
52

This has been mentioned before but I will try to paraphrase what is relevant.

Being able to edit your post is a good thing, However the intent of editing is to improve the content with newer and better content or to correct errors.

If your post has been replied to and changing the content would make the reply irrelevant or misleading then most users will often make the edit and with a following post will indicate that the content of the earlier post was edited so later readers can see what was changed and why. The reason for that is to keep a valid timeline as to what was said and when. This is similar and consistent with what is done in a verbal communication.

Deletion of posts or major changes can easily make the entire discussion of the topic on the forum disjointed and unintelligible. Similar to what happens when a person enters a verbal conversation and starts adding comments without waiting to fully understand the topic or where the discussion is headed. Their comments may be totally irrelevant to the topic because they do not have the full picture at the beginning.

Posts should be on topic and as much as possible relevant to the then current stage of discussion while later deletions or editing of the initial content is disruptive.

You may note that many times when a post is edited there is the word EDIT added with the new/changed content to make it clear what was done. Some even go so far as to strike out the erroneous or irrelevant content and add updated info – yet very few totally delete their posts.

53

In addtion to what Jeff said in his reply…

It should be a choice then :stuck_out_tongue:

Sure, you can choose to contribute or not.

You can’t choose to join a community, provide a bunch of input and then
decide everyone should drop all your contributions and anything that
came from them, leaving them broken and in a shambles.

Is information preservation more beneficial from a financial standpoint? More info available, more hits/popularity, rolling-community discussions will keep non-relevant posts hidden. Who actually benefits from old/outdated info existing permanently and multiple thread creations? Information quantity vs quality?

There’s no financial angle here I can think of.

Contributing to a community is done with good-intent, but changing or removing info is restricted for reasons that seemingly don’t benefit the original contributor.

Once the original contributor contributed, thats part of the shared
community.

I grow and change like the community and project does; I might feel strongly about a post one day, then see how it might look differently the next; that’s what editing is for!

Sure, but once people have replied and discussed your post, removing it
makes all their contributions at best confusing and at most completely
worthless. You are putting yourself over everyone who has interacted
with you and anyone who would come along later and learn from your
contribution.

Maybe it’s too off-topic; delete. Maybe someone edited their post months earlier and I want to change mine to keep the thread relevant or add something useful learned later: they got the edit within the age limit but I (might) not be able to. I don’t want to edit my own content nefariously.

There are legit reasons to edit things.
mass deleting isn’t one IMHO.

64

Since long I was thinking a ask-fedora section in discussion would make sense. If we put it in Site-Feedback then the whole world likes to give its opinion, while on discussion it selves we could restrict it to TL3+. In the end we do the work and know the system as it works for now.

66

We hold every one to the same standard.

In the case of the 2 people you mention I have not seen them abuse the use of delete. In the cases I have seen they have delete posts that were a mistake and did not break the flow of the discussion.

Do you have examples of where this was not the case?

68

While I don’t want to engage in the arguments, it might be useful to add more data to maybe make the perspective of us more comprehensible and to show that there is a difference that is not based on opinions (maybe that adds some understanding for our reasoning): one thing that is quantitative & objective, and one thing that is qualitative & subjective:

quantitative & objective: excluding steppybug, the “worst” ratio of overall deletions compared to remaining posts I have seen was 19.?? percent, so below 20%, and most are below 1% (so deleted posts make up 20% of the remaining posts of a user). The ratio of steppybug is 809.09 %.. These stats do not consider the exploitation of the edit function, so it is effectively likely more.

qualitative & subjective: in deletions I processed, I never had to decide before whose interests weigh higher: that of a user who wants a deletion, or that of all users who responded (directly or indirectly) and whose work is rendered useless through the deletion. In the case of steppybug, I had to make this decision many times, sometimes more than once a day. This does not prove if any other mod had to make that decision any time before at another user (I cannot go through all flags:), but we can say with a high certainty that it has never occurred in an organized manner, and never in a manner that made users complaining about it and feeling disadvantaged (and in this case, not just a few complaints).

This is the point at which we must weigh interests (again): and if we cannot serve all interests, we serve (within the boundaries and under the guidance of our rules as far as they tell) primarily the goal/intention (and wider rules) of the community/discourse and secondarily, in case of remaining doubts, the interests of the majority (luckily, these two conditions are equal here).

To be honest, if considering the existing set of rules and guides (including functions that are in consensus configured in a certain way to avoid bureaucratic written rules), I think it cannot be debated if that type of deletion is justified: it’s not. The debate would be more if we (mods) are intended to process any deletion request at all (because the function is disabled intentionally after some time). The latter debate can be answered by any mod with “yes I can process it” as long as the user who posted wants the deletion and no other user is affected (directly or indirectly) in ways that are non-compliant to the intention/goals/rules of Discourse/Community as outlined in many tech and non-tech guides, rules, etc.

It cannot be avoided that sometimes an qualitative “educated guess” is necessary as not every issue a mod processes can be quantified or “mathematically calculated”. But in this case, I think the stats shown above along with other conditions reoccurring only in this case (repeated already sufficiently often also in this topic) show already that there is a big gap, easy to identify & to delimit, in between the deletions we usually have, and this particular case.

71

You have an odd way to do that by damaging topics of value with deletions.

72

Using PMs would still cause confusion for the rest of the site participants. If you answer a question via PM, then unless the person who asked the question amends their post to note that the question was answered via PM, no one would know that the question was answered and that would lead to either duplication of efforts if another person picks up the question or an increase in “apparently” unanswered questions. Both consequences are negative. Also, imagine if everyone did that – the person who asked the question would keep getting the same responses over and over again because no one would know that others were answering. It is better if there is open collaboration when working towards a solution.

73

Addition: there is no review in PM. We have seen already solutions that cause harm. This is usually not intentional, but sometimes people are not aware of the actual impact of the commands they use or spread. If something is really serious, there is a 90% chance that someone who skims the topics will know and make aware → in PM, not :open_mouth:

74

Stats tell you a lot.

The stats that Chris quoted show that you leave < 2 in 10 posts while the other 8+ are deleted (>809% deletions).
Other users leave at least 8 of 10 posts while deleting at the most 2 of 10 (<20% deletions) and the great majority are deleting much less than 1% of their posts (< 1 per 100 posts).

This means your actions are extreme when compared with everyone else.

75

I just reviewed every single post of mine. Absolutely nothing would be lost if they were all deleted.

Since the information that may exist in any of the topics would be better answered by existing documentation I contend that keeping them around can only be detrimental. I would like to be helping users who may stumble upon any of the topics by getting rid of them.

If everyone who posted here deleted their contributions as they became obsolete or unecessary this resource would be improved.

The only negative I can see, though not an actual negative, would be a much lower amount of content per user where that volume of content may be pseudo valuable in the social media popularity aspect. I seek genuine positive impact acknowledged or not.

As this topic exemplifies, communication is hard. Does anyone see any meaningful exchange of ideas happening in all this?

76

To be honest, no. My feeling is that the state of this topic at this time is the same as at the initial post (and with this, I do NOT want to say you are to blame for this or so → it’s just an observation / interpretation of the development in the topic). Have you ever considered to contribute to the Docs team or in the Matrix channel? I am not sure if that is more useful for your preferred approach. Especially Docs has afaik always many articles that need revision (that might be something for you?).

77

FWIW, I already suggested essentially the same:

78

As mentioned, we will revert all attempts to use edit to delete topic head posts due to the implications it causes to all subsequent posts. This includes this one, so I just reverted. You might want to just post your last comment here rather than replacing the whole head post with it. The conclusion belongs to the end, not the beginning :classic_smiley:

py0xc3 (Chris) 79

@steppybug Despite several warnings, you have again edited the title/head of this topic. This time to a ranting post. This is an official warning. The next time I suspend your account for 2 weeks.