Apparently, over the weekend, it seems that the user-pages of nearly 80 currently employed and ex-Linden Lab staff were mass-deleted from the Second Life wiki, along with related meeting transcripts, modification histories, revisions and the like.
There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the deletions. Some are still there while some are gone, and whether the staff-member in question is currently employed or not doesn’t seem to be a major determining factor.
The deletion appears to have been software-generated, and not performed or triggered by a third-party (ie. Linden Lab appears to have elected to do this).
It still might, potentially, be accidental. I’ve contacted the Lab spokespeople for comment, though they are not immediately available to do so.
UPDATE (9:36AM – US Pacific):
A Linden Lab spokesperson provided the following statement on behalf of the Lab:
“After a careful review of the content, we’ve removed a number of pages from the Second Life wiki as part of an ongoing clean-up effort, designed to make that resource more current, more helpful, and less confusing than it has been in the past. Where appropriate, we’ll move valuable content (relevant tutorials, for example) to other pages.“
Wow, that’s pretty brutal since many of them had very useful SL related information on them. A very huge blow to those who rely on tutorials.
I think it is the work of Rand Linden, but to what end, exactly? I get the impression that a whole lot of valuable information has been lost in the process.
Part of Kelly Linden’s page was moved to Ama Omega’s page, it looks like. This is probably worse than deletion. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Ama_Omega/archive/office_hour_topics
UPDATE (9:36AM – US Pacific):
A Linden Lab spokesperson provided the following statement on behalf of the Lab:
“After a careful review of the content, we’ve removed a number of pages from the Second Life wiki as part of an ongoing clean-up effort, designed to make that resource more current, more helpful, and less confusing than it has been in the past. Where appropriate, we’ll move valuable content (relevant tutorials, for example) to other pages.“
Ya’ gotta love bureaucratic jargon. “..careful review..”, “..a number of pages..”, “..ongoing..”, “Where appropriate..”. All good words and phrases for avoiding actually explaining anything.
Well, if a large enough number of us raise a stink, and continue to raise a stink, maybe they’ll revert a lot of this.
Good luck with that Nathan, remember the pre-Zindra stink? Teens-on-the-main-grid stink? etc., etc.
LL is notoriously olfactory challenged.
On the other hand, remember the RedZone stink. THAT one hit enough of a nerve… actually, turned into enough of a firestorm, that LL actually did something about it.
Regardless what information was removed… it’s about time.
Clean and neat is the best way to educate for those need to know.
@Nacon “Clean and neat is the best way to educate for those need to know.”
Yes. True. Todays generation of retards need information presented in the simplest form.
Local libraries, pressed for shelf space, should turf out those silly books about old things/events/people.
Linden Lab finds missing 80 Wiki pages of LL employees. It was hidden among the millions of items of lost inventory.
On a more serious note, a question to Linden Lab: is it better to remove or archive?
As Breen points out above, the standard is to place older things in less-accessible but still-available areas, not delete them entirely.
Even with Elf Clan, we pay $20 a year to maintain our archival blogs. According to our records, those archived blogs still receive about 100 hits a week… apparently accessed from other blog sites.
Perhaps LL should take that into consideration. When they archived their forums, they removed the photos that were with them… destroying a significant part of Second Life history. That’s a shame.
I wonder if some of the new folks who don’t appreciate the value people put in that history didn’t just “tidy up a bit”. I have noticed a certain cluelessness among some of the newer Lindens regarding the investment people have made in SL for years and the value and affection people have for the history and culture that has developed through those years. Too many of the folks who have seen the grid evolve into what it is today are gone now.
Everyone can check what has been deleted here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&limit=250&type=delete&month=&year= . The majority of Linden user pages and the template that allowed to indicate who is employed by Linden Lab have been deleted by an automated process (bot) with the reason “ (Obsolete or disallowed information re: LL)”
quite a late comment, some of the information has indeed been folded into existing articles, subpages of previous user pages still exist and are findable via searching the user names space, although optimally all office hours archives will be relinked to relevant user groups.
Rand seems to be doing most of the heavy lifting, but has publicly stated that the policy direction came down from Amanda, and that policy seems to aimed at limiting unofficial lines of communications with lindens that are not outward facing department leads (mainly those not heading up “user groups”).
There may be some other basic employee policy involved to prevent personal information being locked into exposure for former employees who would no longer have access to delete privileges, or at least it seams a likely reason for the change if a complaint about that was made.