Stephen Gilbert wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
To make this really work well, we should include one more thing: the ability to delete individual versions from a page's history. This would be used to remove copyright violations, and for no other reason. There are many copyright violations hidden in pages' histories now, and we are technically in violation of copyright for having them, however unobvious it may be for somebody to get to them. So we need to do this anyway, as has been suggested before. Only sysops would be able to do this, with a "del" link next to the "diff" and "cur" links in each page's history.
I agree with most of your proposal, but I'm not sure of this part. I do agree with the need to remove copyright violations. I am concerned, however, that people may be too quick to use this function. We've had many cases where one Wikipedian believed a text to be under copyright, but it was actually contributed by the copyright holder. If such a feature was put in place, we would have to develop a fairly strict policy on why and how to use it.
Nowadays, nobody deletes a copyright violation quickly. These form one of the types of deletions that nobody argues about; they're blanked out, placed on the deletion queue, and only deleted after several days have passed. We can have a copyright violation deletion queue which should be run the same way -- wait a few days. Nobody is being quick on the trigger about these now, only (it is alleged) about other things like microstubs.
On the other hand, everyone could loosen up on deletions. :)
That's what I hope. As Kajikit said, the issue is taking up too much of our time, and making deletions "soft" like this should decrease the tension.
-- Toby