On 12/10/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
If oversight just deleted the text and the summary, and left the rest of the information, that'd also accomplish this.
Alternatively we could give the "oversighters" the ability to retroactively edit the old revisions (and the corresponding edit summaries) replacing strings of offensive text with "[redacted]", or "[redacted by [USER]], or a long black streak, or whatever.[2]
This would leave the remainder of the edit history intact, ensuring that nobody loses attribution[3] for their edits by failing to notice that section 8 contained Paris Hilton's cell phone number at the time of their (innocent) edits to section 3.
[1] FSVO "offensive", http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hiding_revisions#Use [2] With a little extra thought, the devs could create a non-spoofable placeholder syntax for any redacted text. [3] I would prefer a definition of "attribution" which exceeds the GFDL requirements, namely the ability (from here to eternity) to look at every diff of every article and be able to see which text was added, modified, or removed by which user, except in situations where *that particular* text has been "hidden".
-C.W.