Hello, On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 5:19 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The policy on fr.wikipedia is to keep all revisions but those that (may) cause legal issues (copyvio, slander, etc.: routine) or that require an oversight action (pretty rare). -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]]

2008/9/12 David Moran <fordmadoxfraud(a)gmail.com>om>: It should be applied very conservatively, but there is a place for it. - d.

2008/9/12 Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)gmail.com>om>: Yeah, like I said, if the edit has been reverted there's no problem. If the edit hasn't been reverted than obviously you can't just delete it, but nobody has claimed you can.

2008/9/12 Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)gmail.com>om>: Yup which means a copyvio will generally mean deleting back to the last clean version which can be a bit of a pain. -- geni

Cary Bass wrote: This is surely excessive. Edits since the copyvio may very well have bent the copyvio passages far out of recognition. Remember too that copyright does not apply to ideas, but to the expression of those ideas. Ec

Question. Didn't the practice of oversighting and deleting selective versions previously cause prolems with misattributing who created the adjacent contributions, by virtue of making the "removed" edits functionally invisible? Is that still an issue? If so, wouldn't it be better for oversight or deletion to still list the offensive edits visibly as "existing", but completely unclickable save for those that have permissions to view them? i.e... the final product would look like this: Edit 10: Oversighter oversights Edit #4 (no clickable link Edit 9: some user adds fine content: <clickable link for anyone> Edit 8: some user adds fine content: <clickable link for anyone> Edit 7, someone adds bad stuff again, but even worse now: <clickable link for only Oversighters, shows just date/time stamp/contributor name or IP, shows name of Oversighter as having blocked this edit> Edit 6: some user adds fine content: <clickable link for anyone> Edit 5: some user adds fine content: <clickable link for anyone> Edit 4, admin deletes page, restores with out Edit #2 <clickable link for anyone> Edit 3: some user adds fine content: <clickable link for anyone> Edit 2, someone adds defamation or whatever "bad" content, <clickable link for only admins, shows just date/time stamp/contributor name or IP, shows name of admin that last deleted this> Edit 1, new page: <clickable link for anyone> - Joe

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: This "should" you speak of - are you referring to an enforced rule on all WMF projects or your own personal opinion? Because, things *are* oversighted/deleted without being reverted first. It happens, and it will most likely continue to happen. Allowing it to happen in a way that doesn't violate the GFDL would be a good thing.

Fine, "undo", then. It doesn't matter what technically happens, what's important is that no part of that edit is still in the current version.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: The confidential information is in all the revisions. The software doesn't allow you to "just remove the confidential information".

On 9/15/08, Anthony &lt;wikimail(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: One approach (which is already being discussed if I read correctly) would be to keep the "positive contributions" listed in the edit history but not viewable except by oversighters (because they incidentally contain badstuff). This would preserve GFDL attribution without needing to add any non-standard (non-machine-readable and most likely to be ignored by mirrors/re-users of the content) addenda on the talk page or elsewhere. Attribution info required by the GFDL: *Who (username, can be forcibly renamed if it causes problems) *When (year -- full timestamp is actually optional, but cannot possibly cause problems) Optional information can be de-activated if it creates problems: *What (text of each revision) *Why (edit summary) *How ("...using AWB", etc.) Also those who care about their edit count would also avoid penalty for picking the wrong article to work on. :P Caveat: Making it obvious that something has been removed makes it easy to obtain from a database dump if one is successful produced after the badstuff was added but before it was removed. It is my understanding that successful database dumps are becoming increasingly rare. Has anybody ever thought about doing split dumps instead? If there is an emergency where a few lines need to be urgently removed from a database dump it would be more efficient to work with smaller files rather than one big one which has everything since the dawn of time, which very few people will want, and which is greater than the combined GB of all hard drives I've owned. And anybody who has an ongoing need for ALL PAGE REVISIONS would probably rather use incremental dumps than delete and download everything from scratch. —C.W.

On 9/16/08, Anthony &lt;wikimail(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: Depends, what are you using this for? —C.W.

Joe Szilagyi &lt;szilagyi(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes; see the upcoming bitfields feature. <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bitfields_for_rev_deleted> <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Image:Revision_deletion_history_view.png> -- Yours cordially, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)