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by LarryMullins 1278 days ago
The "ADL files" controversy from the 90s has been progressively de-emphasized on wikipedia.

1993 NYTimes article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/24/us/anti-defamation-league...

2018: 1000+ words about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Defamation_L...

2019: about 400 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Defamation_L...

2020: less than 100 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-Defamation_L...

Present: less than 100 words, and no longer given it's own subtitled section but buried in the middle of a summary of a decade (not mentioned in the 'Controversies' section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League#1990s

1 comments

The history is preserved through the archive though, no? Wouldn't compaction be the logical result over time? In my head I'm thinking that old events probably used to have surpluses of books and editorials written about them that now occupy the chapter of a history book that you might read twice.
> Wouldn't compaction be the logical result over time?

I don't think what's happening on that article is organic history compaction. For one, the controversy is about 30 years old but has been 'compacted' by an order of magnitude in about 4 years. I would expect organic history compaction to fairly linear and continuous (as the passage of time is.) Secondly, the controversies section on that article still has several paragraphs about less substantial stuff which happened almost 50 years ago.

ah, that's fair. I generally have no sense of what constitutes organic vs deliberate or if there's even standards for this stuff.