Appologies if this comes to the list twice I used the wrong address last time...
This is on VfD but I thought it worth mentioning here.
The article for "pop punk" ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_punk ) was expanded last week by a new user. He then realised that his work may have copyright implications and asked for it to be deleted. I reverted to the stub that was there before he started work, but he asked for the versions in the history to be deleted too. Presumably a developer could selectively delete the problem versions, or we could delete the whole thing and then replace the original stub. The problem with doing that is that the history would be gone too.
How should we deal with selective deletions of this type? Or am I worrying too much about the article history?
Regards
sannse
sannse wrote:
The article for "pop punk" ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_punk ) was expanded last week by a new user. He then realised that his work may have copyright implications and asked for it to be deleted. I reverted to the stub that was there before he started work, but he asked for the versions in the history to be deleted too. Presumably a developer could selectively delete the problem versions, or we could delete the whole thing and then replace the original stub. The problem with doing that is that the history would be gone too.
Developers have deleted individual revisions in the past; back when we allowed links to external images, a vandal put in several links to goatse.cx, and the versions of the pages with those links were removed entirely from the database of old versions, to avoid horrifying people that looked at these versions. (Now that we don't allow links to external images, these old versions would be free of goatse.cx even if they still existed.)
For our own protection under copyright, we should be legally safe unless a copyright holder demands that we remove the text under the DMCA provisions. In that case, to comply would require devloper activity as in the previous paragraph.
If the new user is worried about our own liability, then we shouldn't have to do anything for now. If the new user is worried that people will revert to their old material, then the talk page should be enough to discourage this. If the new user is demanding removal on behalf of the copyright holder, then they're not going about it properly per the DMCA -- but I don't think that this is what's going on. ^_^
How should we deal with selective deletions of this type? Or am I worrying too much about the article history?
Potentially, the article history in this case could be dealt with rather easily on the talk page. Say what anonymous ID created the text and when; say what user wikified it and when, and the entire relevant history has been described. But in general, it'd be better if a developer deleted the revisions.
-- Toby
Toby wrote:
If the new user is worried about our own liability, then we shouldn't have to do anything for now. If the new user is worried that people will revert to their old material, then the talk page should be enough to discourage this. If the new user is demanding removal on behalf of the copyright holder, then they're not going about it properly per the DMCA -- but I don't think that this is what's going on. ^_^
As I understand it, his concern was purely to do the right thing. His use of copyrighted material was a genuine mistake and he wanted to set it right - nice to see :)
Potentially, the article history in this case could be dealt with rather easily on the talk page. Say what anonymous ID created the text and when; say what user wikified it and when, and the entire relevant history has been described. But in general, it'd be better if a developer deleted the revisions.
Thanks for the advice. It should have it's time on VfD, and then maybe one of the developers will do the selective deletion for us.
Thanks again
sannse