Hi there. We've got a problem on it.wikipedia. Recently a sysop tried to delete the page [[it:Football Club Internazionale Milano]] in order to hide a vandalism that should not be available on the history page (copyright violation, blasphemies, personal information, etc) but the page reached 5000 edits, so he got an error.
I tried looking all over meta for a precedent but I wasn't able to find any. We don't have an ''oversight'' user group on it.wikipedia, and as I can see from the discussions, the community doesn't want any. So, the problem now is: "how can we remove a certain vandalism from the history"?
"Bingo, history splitting" someone said... We (literally) call this procedure "un-historizing" a page. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, so I'll try to explain how it works. There is a page called [[ABC]] and it has a lot of versions. We move this page to [[ABC/History up to <DATE>]], block this page; then we manually copy the last revision to the [[ABC]] page and put in the "edit summary" box a sentence like: "This page was ''un-historized''. To see the old history go there: [[ABC/History up to <date>]]".
This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure be GFDL-compliant? I believe that the local community has to be free to decide about local policies, but when there is the risk that a local policy might not be GFDL-compliant, I think that asking before acting is a reasonable approach.
Sincerely,
Emanuele Casadio wrote:
Hi there. We've got a problem on it.wikipedia. Recently a sysop tried to delete the page [[it:Football Club Internazionale Milano]] in order to hide a vandalism that should not be available on the history page (copyright violation, blasphemies, personal information, etc) but the page reached 5000 edits, so he got an error.
I tried looking all over meta for a precedent but I wasn't able to find any. We don't have an ''oversight'' user group on it.wikipedia, and as I can see from the discussions, the community doesn't want any. So, the problem now is: "how can we remove a certain vandalism from the history"?
"Bingo, history splitting" someone said... We (literally) call this procedure "un-historizing" a page. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, so I'll try to explain how it works. There is a page called [[ABC]] and it has a lot of versions. We move this page to [[ABC/History up to <DATE>]], block this page; then we manually copy the last revision to the [[ABC]] page and put in the "edit summary" box a sentence like: "This page was ''un-historized''. To see the old history go there: [[ABC/History up to <date>]]".
This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure be GFDL-compliant? I believe that the local community has to be free to decide about local policies, but when there is the risk that a local policy might not be GFDL-compliant, I think that asking before acting is a reasonable approach.
Sincerely,
I really recommend against it. Stewards can delete big pages (and perform oversights there if needed).
Hopefully, we will have soon the per-revision deletion and that limit will go away.
Emanuele Casadio wrote:
This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure be GFDL-compliant?
When we renamed [[en:Angola/History]] to [[en:History of Angola]] (after it was decided that subpages was a bad idea), we copied the text, because back then there was no way to rename a page. In the revision history, it looks as if I (user:LA2) created this page on February 25, 2002, but I probably only contributed the initial line. The oldest versions from 2001 can be found in the revision history of [[Angola/History]], but this was never documented.
Sometimes, in order to follow the wiki spirit, GFDL was ignored.
2009/2/13 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
When we renamed [[en:Angola/History]] to [[en:History of Angola]] (after it was decided that subpages was a bad idea), we copied the text, because back then there was no way to rename a page. In the revision history, it looks as if I (user:LA2) created this page on February 25, 2002, but I probably only contributed the initial line. The oldest versions from 2001 can be found in the revision history of [[Angola/History]], but this was never documented.
[Slightly OT]
Actually, with a delete-move-undelete merge, you can combine the histories of the articles.
Yours,
On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Emanuele Casadio wrote:
This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure be GFDL-compliant?
When we renamed [[en:Angola/History]] to [[en:History of Angola]] (after it was decided that subpages was a bad idea), we copied the text, because back then there was no way to rename a page. In the revision history, it looks as if I (user:LA2) created this page on February 25, 2002, but I probably only contributed the initial line. The oldest versions from 2001 can be found in the revision history of [[Angola/History]], but this was never documented.
We're not discussing the same thing here.
Emanuele is talking about intentionally "archiving" the old edit history of an article (to avoid reaching 5,000 revisions at the same title).
You are talking about creating a new article with information cut from the "==History==" section of the main article (to avoid letting it grow too big to load)
Either of these could be considered GFDL-compliant by Wikipedia standards as long as the page titles and link syntax are standardized enough to be machine-readable (so at the current time, no).
If I wish to mirror the [[History of Angola]] article and credit all editors who may have directly or indirectly contributed to the current content of this article it would be easy to scrape the edit history of [[History of Angola]] and the upload log for each image in the article. But it would be much harder to get a list of users who have edited the [[Angola#History]] section. Even if they have never edited [[History of Angola]] they may have contributed material which was cut-n-pasted from the former to the latter.
Perhaps we add something like this on the toolserver, some way examine all edits to an article and get a list of users who have made changes to a section with a certain title. This could be integrated with some kind of "extended attribution" tool as long as it knows which rocks to look under.
There would always be a number of false positives (credit where none is necessarily due) to this approach. However this is already the case when you consider vandalism and reverts, or edit wars or any other case where no unique revision is added. I guess one could get more sophisticated with this, by considering only the earliest revision when duplicates are found, then get a list of unique users contributing to the short list of revisions.
False negatives on the other hand would be harder to correct.
—C.W.
Perhaps we simply need to establish that a link to a WP article is a GFDL reference, and let it go at that, without the complications. When the rules get into the position of hampering the writing of the encyclopedia ...
David
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Emanuele Casadio wrote:
This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure be GFDL-compliant?
When we renamed [[en:Angola/History]] to [[en:History of Angola]] (after it was decided that subpages was a bad idea), we copied the text, because back then there was no way to rename a page. In the revision history, it looks as if I (user:LA2) created this page on February 25, 2002, but I probably only contributed the initial line. The oldest versions from 2001 can be found in the revision history of [[Angola/History]], but this was never documented.
We're not discussing the same thing here.
Emanuele is talking about intentionally "archiving" the old edit history of an article (to avoid reaching 5,000 revisions at the same title).
You are talking about creating a new article with information cut from the "==History==" section of the main article (to avoid letting it grow too big to load)
Either of these could be considered GFDL-compliant by Wikipedia standards as long as the page titles and link syntax are standardized enough to be machine-readable (so at the current time, no).
If I wish to mirror the [[History of Angola]] article and credit all editors who may have directly or indirectly contributed to the current content of this article it would be easy to scrape the edit history of [[History of Angola]] and the upload log for each image in the article. But it would be much harder to get a list of users who have edited the [[Angola#History]] section. Even if they have never edited [[History of Angola]] they may have contributed material which was cut-n-pasted from the former to the latter.
Perhaps we add something like this on the toolserver, some way examine all edits to an article and get a list of users who have made changes to a section with a certain title. This could be integrated with some kind of "extended attribution" tool as long as it knows which rocks to look under.
There would always be a number of false positives (credit where none is necessarily due) to this approach. However this is already the case when you consider vandalism and reverts, or edit wars or any other case where no unique revision is added. I guess one could get more sophisticated with this, by considering only the earliest revision when duplicates are found, then get a list of unique users contributing to the short list of revisions.
False negatives on the other hand would be harder to correct.
—C.W.
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On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:50 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps we simply need to establish that a link to a WP article is a GFDL reference, and let it go at that, without the complications. When the rules get into the position of hampering the writing of the encyclopedia ...
As I was trying to explain, that wouldn't do any good in cases where the content we are trying to attribute was originally added to a different article.
—C.W.
A note on the talk page or a link in the edit history could establish that.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:50 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps we simply need to establish that a link to a WP article is a GFDL reference, and let it go at that, without the complications. When the rules get into the position of hampering the writing of the encyclopedia ...
As I was trying to explain, that wouldn't do any good in cases where the content we are trying to attribute was originally added to a different article.
—C.W.
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