A Scorched Data Policy Is Bad for Web, Bad for History

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 :) <a href="http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/" rel="nofollow">http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/</a> for example.

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.<p>Without mass deletion, anyone, absolutely anyone, can go look at the <i>unchanged</i> <i>unedited</i> 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.

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

Bad for history maybe, but I liken this sort of thing to personal email archives.<p>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 <i>as you are making them</i>, rather than a hundred years from now when the archive has eclipsed available storage capacity.<p>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.