Completely lost vs. Lost to public vs. Unavailable online
Aug 16, 2016 18:30:59 GMT
artiegirl likes this
Post by exmember on Aug 16, 2016 18:30:59 GMT
Hi! I've been following the wiki for a little while, and have a comment on the distinctions between the types of lost content.
It seems to me that there's a number of different levels of "lost", all covered here, but some probably more lost than others. There's articles and forum threads on completely lost content, but also a lot on episodes of series that aren't on YouTube, or where the DVD is rare or expensive, which aren't really lost but difficult to access.
I'm wondering if maybe additional categorisation might be an idea between these? There's quite a few states of this, as best I can tell:
It seems to me that there's a number of different levels of "lost", all covered here, but some probably more lost than others. There's articles and forum threads on completely lost content, but also a lot on episodes of series that aren't on YouTube, or where the DVD is rare or expensive, which aren't really lost but difficult to access.
I'm wondering if maybe additional categorisation might be an idea between these? There's quite a few states of this, as best I can tell:
- Existence unconfirmed - Where it's not known if the media ever existed, so it may not be lost;
- Existence debunked - As above (picked up from another thread), where a media thought to exist is confirmed as a hoax or similar;
- Completely lost - Where no known surviving copies exist both privately and publicly - e.g. Cleopatra;
- Lost to public - Where it is known or likely to exist, but locked away in a vault or otherwise unavailable by any reasonable means - e.g. Christine Chubbuck tape, a lot of old shame movies;
- Unavailable online - Where a media is not really lost, but isn't easily accessible - e.g. expensive and rare DVDs, popular series removed from streaming services.
I suppose some people wouldn't consider the last one to be lost at all, but I'm just thinking that maybe a form of categorisation around this could work? Certainly for some people, the completely lost content is most exciting, as it's the biggest challenge to try to find. But lost to public content is probably the easiest for people to work on, as emailing around can maybe find this stuff. It's very rare, it seems, for any post-2000 content to be completely lost unless it was intentionally destroyed.
Just some thoughts! 
