Magnus Manske wrote:
- Should we introduce some users with a "trusted" status? So some "old
hands" could do some maintnance, like permanently deleting obsolete pages, without access to the really crucial functions like direct database access.
One idea I had seems very doable and very useful.
One of the main reasons we want to delete some pages is so that underlined links go back to being questionmark links, tempting the reader to write something. (And also making the link show up on most requested, and so on.)
For that purpose, the side-effect of deletion, which is to delete the history as well, is just that: a side-effect. We don't really need it.
Since any user can delete all the text anyway, it would not hurt for them to be able to delete the page, too.... that is, IF they don't also automatically delete the history.
There can be reasons to delete the history, of course! Sometimes the history will just be so very wrong that we must delete it. Maybe it will be a copyright violation, or maybe it will be just really mean-spirited or something.
But in most cases where we want to delete pages, they're just silly, and there's not much harm done in leaving the history.
--Jimbo