This is my first daylog ever. I also hope it will be my last.

Shanoyu: I disagree with you on so many levels it's hard to know even where to start. But if you're saying "Who cares?" about E2 editorial policy, then I have to answer that

I do.
To me, and presumably to almost everyone who has taken liveforever's Covenant, E2 is not just a game like Medievia. Neither is it a social experience: I never use the Chatterbox, I don't know anybody on E2 in real life, and I don't particularly want to. And neither am I expecting fame or fortune from my endeavours -- hell, I'd prefer it if people could not connect "gn0sis" to my real-life identity, although I am aware that connecting the dots isn't too tough and I keep this in mind while noding.

So. Like most factual noders, I think that Everything is (or at least has the potential to be) the ultimate encyclopedia, offering all information from all points of view, hyperlinked to yet more information. Such a thing would be immensely useful once it contained even a fraction of the world's knowledge, and to some degree E2 is already useful as it is. We factual noders strive to increase that percentage of coverage, to make it exponentially more useful. No, I don't node expecting that my immortal words will be treasured by all and sundry, my only expectations are that

  1. the information is there if someone needs it, and
  2. the factual content of the information will be retained in any superseding writeups.
That's it. It's not very much to ask for, and nearly always the Management keeps things this way. If it didn't, I wouldn't be here, but at Wikipedia or Nupedia.

And this is why I think unjustified mass deletions are worrisome, in fact so worrisome that they sometimes make me wonder if there is any point to noding at all. erevapisces's argument sounds a little overly paranoid to me -- e.g. one easy reason why only noder X's definitions were nuked is that it's trivial to find them with a user search, while going through the entire Devil's Dictionary by hand would be quite a job! -- but the total lack of transparency and accountability in the editorial process bothers me quite a lot. There have been abuses in the past (ask DMan1, holloway, Saige, bexxta...) and, unless they are checked somehow, there will be abuses in the future. All I can offer are a few suggestions:

  • Automatically generated editor logs. This really shouldn't be that hard to implement, and it would remove a burden from those valiant editors who keep such logs by hand.
  • Automatic messages, identifying the editor/god in question, sent when nodes are edited or removed
  • A waiting period and advance notifications for removing nodes with positive reputations (eg. "This node will be automatically nuked in one week unless you can tell me why it should stay")
  • A public forum and/or arbitration process for discussing editorial policy
Enough for now -- back to lurking.

/chatteroff

1: Yeah, DMan is a complex case, and I know half his writeups were plagiarized and much of the rest was flamage. But he still noded some awesome stuff at times, eg. nearly all the dim sum recipes now indexed in Chinese recipes -- but before I waded by hand through all of DMan's writeups in search of them and wrote that node using the results they weren't accessible anywhere, because DMan's dim sum metanode had been nuked!