He points to Stack Overflow's 404 as a good example and claims "We do our best to explain it was removed, why it was removed and where you could possibly find it."
Yet there is still no permanent archive of deleted Stack Overflow content; you have to rely on third party archives like archive.org and even then, you have to be lucky.
SO moderators have a habit of retrospectively deleting old content that is off-topic under current rules, even if it was perfectly on-topic at some time in the past. I feel this is bad internet citizenship -- it's removing internet history for no good reason.
Fair enough, delete newly created off-topic questions under the current moderation rules. But when these types of questions were asked originally they were on topic at the time. Deleting them retrospectively (completely - no redirect either) is still poor form.
And thus we lost dozens of episodes of Doctor Who, and almost lost all of Monty Python (if Terry Jones hadn't stepped in), because someone thought the material was no longer relevant and archival not a chartered function (thought the economics of maintaining an archive are valid).
akent, on a personal level I am torn on the deleted content issue, I understand both sides of this issue. On one hand this is not content the community want to associate with the site, on the other hand we have no facility for redirecting this to an external home. We are experimenting with special locked questions for many of the historical cases, this is a very tough issue we are trying to solve.
Set up a new read-only Stack Exchange site on a new domain. On request and at their discretion, moderators could undelete questions and migrate them to the new site. (Users are redirected to the new site if they visit a question that was migrated there from another site.)
Exclude the site and its posts/activity from most of the listings and indexes on the rest of the network, to emphasize that this content has been removed from the Stack Exchange network. Include a disclaimer in the header of every page.
He points to Stack Overflow's 404 as a good example and claims "We do our best to explain it was removed, why it was removed and where you could possibly find it."
Yet there is still no permanent archive of deleted Stack Overflow content; you have to rely on third party archives like archive.org and even then, you have to be lucky.
SO moderators have a habit of retrospectively deleting old content that is off-topic under current rules, even if it was perfectly on-topic at some time in the past. I feel this is bad internet citizenship -- it's removing internet history for no good reason.
Fair enough, delete newly created off-topic questions under the current moderation rules. But when these types of questions were asked originally they were on topic at the time. Deleting them retrospectively (completely - no redirect either) is still poor form.
(Top read otherwise though!)