Jimmy Wales wrote:
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
But it's not all junk. The Seigenthaler vandalism wasn't noticed for four months because it wasn't a popular page, what if instead of the addition of a falsehood it had been the deletion of truths? That deleted material would have eventually vanished from history under a system like this and the vandalism would become uncorrectable.
It seems to me this sort of functionality would move the debates we've been having over deletion of articles down to the level of the deletion of individual sentences.