March 12, 2002

5:37 PM

Information Activism - Spring Clean the Internet Week.
"We aren't here to censor or judge information. We say publish what you want, useful or frivolous, but take care of it once you've created it. Keep it up to date, make sure it's still doing what you wanted it to do. And if it's not, get rid of it. It's that simple."
posted by jacobw (7 comments total)

Ha!
Don't clutter up the Internet.

Just for that I'm going to scan all these ECA 8-bit game boxes and post them on my website. Then leave it there without maintaining it.
posted by adamv at 6:21 PM on March 12, 2002

"Information Activism isn't just about getting rid of dead information. It's also about information integrity. We're concerned with hoaxes, inaccurate information, and untruths that spread quickly to misinform and scare people."

Sure, take all the fun out of the net. Some people just can't tolerate chaos, freedom and rock and roll.
posted by Domain Master 666 at 7:51 PM on March 12, 2002

At last, someone makes Internet Spring Cleaning do something useful. Remember -- DO NOT connect to the internet during spring cleaning.
posted by dhartung at 9:21 PM on March 12, 2002

Hmph. I'll see you your Internet Spring Clean and raise you a Ghost Site.

WE DEMAND that information that should be preserved is consciously archived, not left around in benign neglect and then retroactively deemed historical artifacts.

And do you also demand that everyone clear out all that junk in their attics and turf it into the trash, so that future generations will never be able to find things like this?

I'm all for fine-tuning of search engines to turn up timely information when that's what one is searching for, but 'demanding' that we all ferret out every last bit of 'old' data comes across as shrill. For a start, it's potentially a lot of work, and worse, it encourages people to chuck out stuff they one day will wish they'd kept. It's like architecture: there's a window of time after a building has reached a certain age and is no longer 'new' but before it's appreciated as 'old' where it's at risk of being demolished, to the regret of future generations. We should think very hard about whether or not to demolish data, just as we should about demolishing buildings - not just go on a spring-clean deleting spree on the urgings of some manifesto.
posted by rory at 2:20 AM on March 13, 2002

It's perfectly simple: keep your spiders and bots out of the old pages I'm not maintaining. What? They're not smart enough to do that? Well, rewrite 'em until they are. What? You're not smart enough to do that? Then you're too dumb to be writing web indexers and the clutter is your fault. Go flip bhurgers.
posted by jfuller at 5:53 AM on March 13, 2002

(Can't believe that I linked stbalbach's user profile instead of the thread of theirs that I meant to. Not that a user profile isn't as worthy of preservation as a medieval book found in a farmhouse, but, y'know...)
posted by rory at 6:06 AM on March 13, 2002

I think there's something quite beautiful and instructive about watching an unmaintained site decay. They talk about "fertile ground", but forget the necessity of humus.
posted by walrus at 7:53 AM on March 14, 2002