On 22/06/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/22/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
I sound like I'm attacking a strawman here, but I honestly don't think I've seen a good reason why people think this tool is dangerous. Please, someone, give me a scenario where this could be used badly, where the ability to expunge deleted revisions is somehow harmful in a way that a public log would prevent...
Person A vandalizes a biographical article, replacing believable claims to notability with unbelievable ones. Person B, not realizing that the article was vandalized, lists it for deletion. Person C reverts the vandalism. Person A's edit is vanished.
At this point, to anyone looking through the article history, it appears that person B is attacking the subject of the article, trying to get that article deleted.
Does anyone do history deletions this way? I don't. You don't delete the revision where the material was *added*, you delete *the revisions containing the material* (which can be a real bastard if it wasn't caught for ages)
This way does leave minor attribution problems, but nothing a note or three can't cure, and it's certainly better than the alternative. Incidentally, because of the odd way we show deleted revisions, the same problem would apply for non-admins (or admins who don't look very hard) even without bringing in oversight...