Re: Opinions, please. Keep entire archive or toss old?

Tommie,

This list is a treasure and we must reject any attempt of destroying it.

I wonder about people who want to "delete their past from the history"
-- they must be too naive -- it simply can't be done. Even if deleted
from this archive, there are possibly ten other mirrors on the
Internet, not to speak abot the Internet Archive that in many cases
preserves different states of the same website.

Everyone has started with some kind of ignorance -- and isn't teaching
one of the main goals of this list?

Asking a "dumb" question on the list isn't a war crime. Even realising
that the question was "dumb" in the responses to it is a valuable
learning experience.

Perhaps it should be written in the guidelines of the list that
posting is an act of giving to the community and this cannot ever be
withdrawn back (and not only due to technical reasons).

I would not worry if a person once didn't know a specific area and
were asking naive questions, but I would greatly be concerned with
people, who always knew everything... :o).

--
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
---------------------------------------
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.



On 10/13/05, Mulberry Technologies List Owner
<xsl-list-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Friends --
>
> I have recently received two apparently unrelated requests to remove
> the first several years of the XSL-List archive from the server.
>
> Both were from people who seemed to be embarrassed that they had
> asked beginner questions and wanted to be known for their more
> advanced contributions. One also implied that since the practice of
> XSL has changed over the years the older postings are misleading.
>
> My personal inclination is to reject the requests, and the premise
> behind them. We all start every new technology as beginners, and
> those of us who know many things were beginners many times. That's not
> something to be embarrassed about, in my opinion. I also do not see
> that the practice of XSL has really matured that dramatically; people
> are still asking many of the questions we were discussing in 1998.
>
> But before making such a decision, I thought I'd ask the list for
> your opinions. (I would be willing to lop off the first few years
> if we really don't want them; I am not willing to edit the archive
> in any more manual or judgement-based way. I will not, for example,
> remove postings by people who don't want their names in the archive.)
>
> So, what do you think?
>
> -- Tommie
> --
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> B. Tommie Usdin                        mailto:btusdin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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