On Dec 9, 2007 9:02 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: the #1 google hit for his name. Given the reasons for his request for deletion in the first place, I guess this should not come as a surprise. Risker

On Dec 9, 2007 9:02 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: I have a copy of the history and would be willing to extract the list of authors and put it on the appropriate talk pages, if that'd satisfy anyone.

On Dec 9, 2007 9:46 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: The license mandates that the authors be listed in a section entitled History, not that you keep a redirect to the page which contains the full edit history. If you'd like me to create an appropriate section entitled History on the pages where things have been copied I can do that, but I seriously doubt it's going to stick. Anyway, the info is at [[User:Anthony/DBC]]. Move it somewhere, link from the talk pages, and at least the "spirit of the license" or whatever you want to call it can be fulfilled. Although, the special characters didn't translate right. Someone should look into that. I nominate you, Bryan.

Quoting Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca>ca>: Satisfying the GFDL by putting things on the talk page is highly questionable. And frankly, almost any Wikipedia article that mentioned Brandt is going to be highly ranked, he won't be happy with this. And he's not going to stop. We had something of a compromise among the community and this isn't it. Furthermore, there's no justification under even the most broad interpretation of BLP to allow this deletion. We don't delete redirects simply to lower google page rankings. The material that was left doesn't talk about Brandt by and large and thus isn't subject to any BLP concern whatsoever. The notion that we would go out of our way to violate the GFDL simply to lower the page rank of a variety of pages is absurd.

Quoting Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>: That argument has been made before and a number of lawyers have considered it to be incorrect. I'm not a lawyer so I won't comment too heavily in that regard. Er no, as I understand it (again, I'm not a lawyer) having an explicit link to the history is ok because we treat them more or less as one document. And in any event, there's an obvious good faith difference between questionably satisfying the GFDL and definitely not satisfying it. This is clearly in the second category. I already listed the many other reasons not to delete this.

Quoting Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>: That's actually a very good point. Is there anyway to merge page histories into multiple articles? Alternatively the closest thing is to copy and paste the list of difs into a dif on the article noting that in the edit summary that it has that there and then removing the list on the next dif (we've done this before and somone I don't remember who commented that this was probably ok). I'm pretty sure nothing's been merged from there. Point of fact even if a tiny bit of content has been merged that's likely usable within fair use, but using almost all the material of an article, not so much. And again, GFDL issues aren't my only concern. We should know by now that Daniel Brandt doesn't stop. Ever. He just keeps demanding more and more. And to do this after we had a very difficult compromise just makes matters worse. The pages that mention him still will still have very high google rankings. This just sends the message to trolls that they can get anything changed on Wikipedia if they harass us long enough. That's not good. Furthermore, there is no, I repeat, no interpretation of BLP that allows for this deletion since it was simply a redirect. Nor for that matter, does BLP justify deleting a page to help lower google rankings at all. If I recall, Fred Bauder a while back floated briefly the idea of having some BLPs not google indexed and the response was pretty negative.

Quoting Anthony &lt;wikimail(a)inbox.org&gt;rg>: Ok, say article X needs the first five edits of an article deleted for privacy concerns. Admin Y deletes those edits, and makes an edit to the article with the edit summary of something like "Look at this dif for list of authors who had edits deleted" and in that edit append to the bottom a list of editors. Then Y makes another edit to remove the list from the page. A different, probably more acceptable variation is what was done at Justin Berry . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Berry See the note at the end of the article. <whine> But I wanna argue now! </whine> You mean you are slowly thinking about a position rather than going with your gut instinct and defending it to the death? What kind of Wikipedian are you?

On 12/10/07, Anthony &lt;wikimail(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: 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.

On Dec 17, 2007 10:08 AM, Charlotte Webb &lt;charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well, if all you let the oversighters do is replace text (including summaries) with "[redacted]", they wouldn't be able to make the kinds of oversights they have made in the past. I'm not sure how much detail I'm allowed to get into when explaining what I mean by that, but for instance you can't hide the fact that User X made an edit to Article A at Time T by simply deleting or redacting text or summaries. Hmm, let me bring up a hypothetical. Say I edit the article for my old high school and insert that the bathrooms often overflowed. Then a bunch more edits get made, keeping my text in there. Then I decide that my old high school is private information and that by inserting that the bathrooms often overflowed I've revealed that I went to that high school. Should the oversighters be allowed to remove this edit of mine? And if so, how would they manage to do that by inserting [redacted]s? Now, if you let the oversighters actually edit the old revisions freely, they could do what they've done in the past even more effectively. They could change my edit into a spelling fix, my summary into "fix spelling", and then change the following person's edit into a reversion of the spelling fix and the insertion of the bathroom overflowing statement. But that'd be way way too much power and ability for abuse. Not to mention unfair to the poor person making the subsequent edit.

On Dec 17, 2007 9:05 AM, &lt;joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu&gt; wrote: Which is why the oversight thing is very limited in the first place. Besides, any indicators of what stuff has been removed are bad; it's simply a red flag saying "Hey! Something got removed here! Look in the mirrors and dumps to see if any of them have it!". That's what happened when the oversight feature was first implemented, which is why the oversight log is no longer public. -Matt

The problem (and solution) is there is a perception that the GFDL isn't in "compliance" with Wikipedia. If Wikipedia can't be GFDL compliant, the GFDL will have to change around Wikipedia to make Wikipedia compliant. It can do this and the board seem to want this happening (if only going as far as to say that they want this to happen in order to permit CC-BY-SA compatibility). The ethics of that process, I leave to others, however.

On 10/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu &lt;joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu&gt; wrote: That would be because he is a sociopathic liar. Which is of course nothing to do with that. - d.

On 10/12/2007, James Farrar &lt;james.farrar(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: When and where it would make sense to do so for nice people too, in terms of our basic content rules. We can do inadvertent but real harm when a questionable-quality Wikipedia article is the first Google hit on someone's name. So single-issue bios tend to be named after the incident rather than the person. - d.

On 10/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu &lt;joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu&gt; wrote: *And* Wikipedia is not Google, and is not responsible for what Google does. ([[WP:WING]] exists, but not to make this point.)

joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu wrote: A surprising number of overturns so far, too. This may yet manage to surprise me and restore a bit of my confidence in the wiki way.

Quoting Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt;ca>: Oh, wow, that's wow. I've left a note on the talk page of the deleting admin. We can't do that. The fact that Brandt isn't mentioned at Criticism of Wikipedia is not good at all either. But violating the GFDL is a whole other level of bad. I do wish people would just leave things alone.