I got a request via email to purge the history records of our latest
goatse.cx vandal, lest some poor unsuspecting wikipedian later come
across them by accident. While there may be arguments for keeping
such a historical record, I think in this case they are outweighed by
the benefits of just deleting them. I did a database backup, just in
case we get subpoenaed to produce them or something, and then I
removed them. The banned IP list clearly shows what happened, when,
and why, so we aren't losing that information, just 54 edit records
that were all reverted (interstingly, he also seems to have made
exactly one legitimate edit, which is still here).
I thought the list should know when things like that are done in case
there's some serious objection to it.