Ending the Archival Process

Summary:

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Ending the Archival Process

gee0765 22 Sep 2021 20:51

After an archival vote was posted to the comments of an article below the deletion threshold, the topic of how and if we should archive articles came up in staffchat. The individuals present during this discussion generally agreed that the best solution seemed to be officially phasing out the archival process, as we did not see any particularly compelling reasons to keep new articles up against the will of the community.

In short, my proposal is that we formally state as staff that we will no longer archive works of fiction on the site. This will not affect the archival of outdated guides and essays, and will not affect pages which are currently archived. It will only prevent the addition of more works of fiction to the list of archived pages.

This discussion will be open for three days.

Re: Ending the Archival Process

cooldude971 23 Sep 2021 17:42

What if a tale focuses heavily on an SCP that was on the website for years before dipping into deletion range? And what about cases like SCP-049, where a truly iconic SCP was rewritten?

I agree that SCPs should not be indiscriminately archived, but I fear this proposal swings too far in the opposite direction. I think archival should remain an option, but only for truly exceptional cases; the burden of proving exceptionalism should fall on those seeking archival.

On a somewhat related note, if you want to deemphasize archivals, I think it would be a good idea to remove the links to the archive hub from the various series lists and other highly central places. The very act of linking to the hub implies a level of community approval that simply does not exist. (I am strongly opposed to deleting the archives, but this is a discussion for another time).

Re: Ending the Archival Process

Ethagon 23 Sep 2021 21:06

Originally I thought Archivals still had a place, but after reading the arguments for the recent Archival vote on the (former?) 6542, I agree that rewrites are far better suited for the modern wiki.

Either way, I'm happy there is now an official stance on this.

Re: Ending the Archival Process

Kothardarastrix 23 Sep 2021 21:21

Well, we could both have and eat our cake - archive applicable articles but also open them up for rewrites like Harmony’s stuff, then get rid of the archived original when a better rewrite comes along. Wouldn’t be an issue for this article since a rewrite is already in progress, but it is still insurance against deletion-induced plot holes. However, most of the old articles with decreasing ratings that have other works dependent on them are not nearly as well-known as Cheesus has been basically from day one. It’s less likely that (for example) if SCP-058 went under there would already be someone standing by to rewrite it, and I would hate to have the heart (ha, see what I did there?) ripped out of The Drooling Path until somebody finally came along willing to do it. I don’t know why people seem so opposed to archival; it’s a good idea that prevents nonsensical crosslinks like the ones in Clef’s proposal from confusing people. There should probably be a certain threshold for just how important is important enough to be archived, but ending the archival system entirely seems like overkill.

Re: Ending the Archival Process

Petrograd 27 Sep 2021 14:13

Support. It may be true that there are current corner cases where archival could make sense, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad and broken policy with little to no formal process for adding or removing things.

Maybe there can be some new policy that does something similar, but getting rid of archiving just makes sense until then.

I do support storing the text of deleted articles as scpper does, but that might be a project foundation thing.