FixOrDelete

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Context: ThoughtStormsIsNotAMuseum / CleaningUpThoughtStorms

How many older notes (2+ years old) have you continued to link to? To grow?
Or do you always start from nothing with re-googling?
Or does Life just make the old notes obsolete?

And I responded (https://twitter.com/interstar/status/1515600186986401797)

Big challenge for me. My personal wiki is 20 years old. I'm often bumping into pages full of dead links or outdated ideas.

One question is "fix or delete"? Use Wayback Machine to recover link or just delete it?

But the biggest issue I've found is it throws new notes into disrepute. I look at something and think "if X seemed so important back then but is completely forgotten now, is it worth writing about Y who seems like the new X and might be equally ephemeral?"

You start wanting to wait until you really know how important something or someone is going to be.

But if you do that you lose all the "life" from your notes.

Notes that last a long time blur the distinctions between the hyper-timeliness of social media and something longer term. But that brings is own dilemma.

Nick responds :

I feel the dilemma here. What percent of outdated notes are ones written in your own words? My hope would be that it's a smaller % than the number of notes of collected words/links from others

For the percent that are your own notes, perhaps the note changes in importance, but still carries meaning: like going from "awesome idea" to "nostalgic idea I had once". Like in "Inside-Out" how happy memories get tinged with a bittersweet quality.

Pages where I wrote the equivalent of a post or short essay tend to last longer than items which are links to external things. EXCEPT the pages where I said "here's what I think is going to happen about X" which, long term are always outdated and wrong.

Problem is I had a habit of freely mixing description and speculation in my longer form writing. And even writing which isn't explicit links is often still in regard to external events or technological innovations, which didn't pan out as I expected.