Currently, http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights says, as I undersand, that when one finds a suspected case of infringement, s/he should delete that part, and then leave a note on the deletion "along with the original source" in talk page.

What Menchi encountered were perhaps a result of that instruction.

Also, I have been wondering if English and other wikipedias keep copyright-infringing material in the article history. True, it is not accessible from search engine, but keeping an infringing material in the page history sounds anyway illegal. And one may download the data including past versions and think the whole thing is under GNU_FDL. Is it trivial enough to ignore?

In Japanese wikipedia, the whole article gets deleted when some infringement is found (or when highly suspected case is not cleared after some period). Upon deleting a page, non-infringing text exist in the past or current versions will be recycled - but the revision history is gone. I don't know if this practice will sustain if, say, someone does an infringing pasting to an article with 100 revisions, though.

If adding a new function for deleting just a past version of an article is fairy easy, I personally would like it to happen.

Currently, Copyright infringement notice in http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Boilerplate_text include "unless a stub replaces this text, deletion will occur." So are there indeed articles with infringing materials in some past revisions?

Cheers,

Tomos

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