The intention of this change, from my point of view, is not to take away rights. The intention is to protect already uploaded data from (accidental or not) deletion in order to provide an accurate dataset to anyone who use it or will use it in the future (and there are already projects, like polaris, that use it).
In detail:
Removing a “Good” observation doesn’t allow satellite teams and other researchers to know that at the time of the observation the satellite was transmitting and to extract any other useful parameters from the waterfall and audio. And if the observation had demoded/decoded data then we lose these data too.
Removing a “Bad” observation doesn’t allow satellite teams and other researchers to know that at the time of the observation the satellite wasn’t transmitting and to extract any other useful parameters from the waterfall and audio.
Removing a “Failed” observation doesn’t allow community and other researchers to understand how the whole network works and to extract info like how often a station gets offline or has hardware or software issues. This is very useful feedback in order to be able to prioritize hardware and software development in order to improve stations and the network and also useful to know how stable the network is.
I’m not sure if it is pointless, for now there is the discussion button that somebody can open a discussion and add comments for an observation. However this doesn’t get into the metadata of the observation, maybe while moving to the artifacts schema we can add a field for notes/comments.
All the stations are important for the network, without them the network wouldn’t be a network, with all the consequences that this can have in helping LSF’s vision for an open and accessible space. I can not express how happy and grateful I am when I see a new station and how sad when a station goes offline and stays in that status for a long time, especially if it was very active before.
Kind of offtopic but related:
I’ve seen in other posts that some people maybe worry about the stations stats. As I’ve commented on an irc/matrix discussion we had about this matter, I want to point out that given the open discussion we have around vetting, it’s clear that vetting it’s not a simple process and it is also in some cases a subjective one, plus that we have many cases were the data weren’t vetted right (either automatically or manually).
So, wrong vetting means wrong stats in stations page. But it’s not only the wrong stats for stations, from discussions I had with other community members, these stats doesn’t show at all the quality of a station, so we need to find new ways and metrics for getting these info. And this is one more reason to reform vetting.
And the question is if these station stats are not correct, why they are there. The answer is that we quickly added this metric for stations in order to have a quick and a rough idea about how the station performs. It was added 3 years ago when the active stations weren’t more than 10 and the needs and priorities were a lot of different than what are today. In other words, it needs to be changed, how and what would be the new metrics is an open discussion.