On 5/31/05, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Indeed, I'm rather surprised at the glib and easy way with which some people suggest "refactoring" copyright violations rather than deleting them when possible. Under normal circumstances, every revision of an article is a derivative work of previous revisions going back to the beginning. Simply rephrasing to avoid identical strings of words is not sufficient to avoid this.
This bothers me as well.
It might be acceptable to 'save' sections added later that are clearly not based on the copyright violation at all. However, all additions and to the areas which began as copyright violations are suspect.
Wikipedia needs an easy method to delete copyvio revisions, for that matter. Right now, copyvio additions to an existing article are often not even brought to WP:CP; they're just reverted.
-Matt