Cleaning out the discussion pages
 

I've been trying to clean out a few of the page's discussion section of old topics that no one's looking at anymore most likely or on a game page like Modern Warfare 2 where they discuss about theories and previews before the game came out like confirmed information, etc. Been trying to clean it up and it's turning out to be a chore because the page is so long.

I try to clean up Discussion pages. Of course I purge the ones where (a) People are arguing like children, which is rare, but it happens and (b) people are hypothesizing about stuff BEFORE a movie is either released in theaters or released on DVD. It's useless and dated information, debating about stuff that has already been proven one way or another. It actually makes the page look bad to see how much arguing or debating or wrong guesses we had BEFORE the film actually came out.... LOL.

But we should NOT remove any small general stuff that is not obviously "dated". Conversations about guns or tactics in a film that are still relevant and interesting to a new member NOW, should be kept. Stuff like that.

Well I've checked the dates on those who sign to see if the last remark was last week or last YEAR. If the conversation's been dead for several months, there's no need to waste space

NO. That's not a benchmark. Whether or not the discussion is entertaining or relevant to a reader who is seeing the page NOW is the benchmark. People read interesting commentary all the time and don't post. The date should not be the reason for purging.....

Well then what do you think is a reason to purge a discussion page?

Didn't I just LIST those criteria in my FIRST POST to this thread?

The video game discussions should be ripe for some culling. If you culled the speculation alone on the Black Ops discussion page, you'd probably reduce it to a tenth of what it was before. I'm sure the MoH and BC2 discussions would be similar.

I agree with getting rid of old, outdated discussion topics. I also really want to see something in the rules about people not making snarky remarks about gun handling or other stuff related to the movie.

If anyone wants to see the kind of discussion I do not want to see at all, here's something I deleted from an actress page:

The person who made this comment is no longer with us (and I won't say their name), but anyone who would say something like this has no social skills whatsoever. I mean, WTF? I realize this site has lots of teenagers, but how difficult is it to understand that posting on IMFDB is nothing like talking with your friends in private conversation? I'm pretty sure that when I was 15, I knew better than to say shit like this on a web site.

I like this philosophy. We should keep interesting discussion and promote readability of the discussion pages (as much as possible given mediawiki's discussion structure) while removing useless, dated, and just plain wrong information.