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