Wikipage Changeset proposed for deletion

[Matt Mackall]

On Fri, 2012-10-26 at 00:59 +0200, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> Matt marked the wikipage ChangeSet
> 
>   http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangeSet
> 
> as proposed for deletion:
> 
>   http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangeSet?action=diff&rev2=40&rev1=39
> 
> (as a minor remark, he failed to comply with what's stated on the page
> WikiCleanup [1], which says in section 3.9 to also add the page to the
> category CategoryProposedDeletion)

Thanks for noting that. That category is now redundant, due to the
A:delete marker, which is automatically indexed on CategoryAudit.

> WikiCleanup states in section 1 ("Goal"), that "duplication of book and
> help content" .. "probably doesn't makes sense to include in the wiki".
> 
> Looking at the history of the ChangeSet page
> 
>   http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangeSet?action=info
> 
> it was created by user "waste" on 2005-08-26 with the content:

Yep. That was actually converted from the wiki we had before Moin, back
before we had either books or glossaries or pretty much any
documentation of any kind. This was a reasonable place to put it then,
though having a separate perpetual stub page for each glossary item was
rather messy.

>   http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangeSet?action=recall&rev=1
> 
> If we look at the front page of the wiki [2], we see a link to
> BeginnersGuides [3] under the heading "Getting started".
> 
> The first link on the BeginnersGuides page links to the page
> UnderstandingMercurial [4], which "attempts to illustrate some of the
> basic concepts" (as noted on that page).
> 
> On UnderstandingMercurial, the first occurrence of the word "changeset"
> links to the page ChangeSet, which is now proposed for deletion.

So... link it to the glossary. And if you find the glossary definition
insufficient... expand it!

Right now, the existence of a bunch of ancient terminology pages is
shadowing the canonical glossary and keeping people from finding it. 

> Googling for the word "changeset" lists the ChangeSet wikipage as second
> position, right after the wikipedia article. I don't see any link to the
> "Mercurial Book".
> 
> In light of all this, I think deleting that page might be problematic
> for the following reasons:
> 
> - Marketing-wise, by deleting that page we shoot ourselves in the foot,
>   as people googleing for that term now land on a page under control by
>   the project. By deleting that page we leave the Wikipedia article
>   alone.

That's not a reason to avoid deleting. That's a reason to link to the
right things. Google won't get smarter without help.

> - If we delete ChangeSet, we might also delete UnderstandingMercurial.
>   But in my view this doesn't make that much sense.

Nor in my view. Changeset is a glossary term. It belongs (and is!) in
the built-in help. UnderstandingMercurial is not. And like Tutorial,
UnderstandingMercurial serves a purpose not as well-served by the book:
getting up to speed quickly. It covers in one page what the book takes
over three chapters to explain. That said, I do in fact think that
UnderstandingMercurial _also_ needs to go and should be merged into
Tutorial.

Further, UnderstandingMercurial is in the top 10 most popular pages.
ChangeSet is way down the list. Nor do I even WANT it to be popular.. it
actually gets into far too much detail. We certainly don't need people
reading about using 'hg debugdata' right off the bat.

The only reason ChangeSet didn't get deleted outright is that unlike
many of its antediluvian siblings, it has some non-trivial content that
might belong somewhere on the wiki, possibly in CategoryInternals. 

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.