You know how wikis inevitably tend to accrue pages that are out of date? So out of date that there’s not even a good reason for the page to exist anymore?
When I come across such a page, I’m tempted to edit it and/or delete it, but then I think about all the things that might link to it and I’m not sure what they should link to now, and at that point I lose my motivation to clean up the wiki so it keeps growing weeds.
I was inspired by thinking about the relative ease of closing tickets in a bug tracker. A couple clicks and you’re done, and links to the ticket from elsewhere in the bug tracker are now rendered in such a way that you know it’s a closed bug.
Could a wiki have a similar feature? Maybe there could be a “Mark this page as obsolete” button in the wiki UI. And a text input where you could optionally specify a new URL that supersedes the page.
Once marked as obsolete, the wiki software would:
- Render a big “This page is obsolete” header at page top. If a replacement URL was specified, show a link to it.
- Possibly gray out the remainder of the text, or just remove it and provide a link to the previous historical revision. (Don’t just delete it though. Sometimes people need old information. This is also why I wouldn’t want to just redirect.)
- When rendering wiki links to such a page, style them differently somehow, so that you get some kind of warning that the link points to something obsolete… add a little icon or something? dunno. Or maybe old links could be updated to point to the replacement URL if one was provided.
Something like that. This would give the users support for one-click wiki cleanup.