Alex R. wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com
- An existing article that has had cut-n-paste added to it, and
immediately reverted. Individual revision(s) can be blanked easily.
Can we do that right now as administrators (I was wondering what the delete this page function means when it show up on prior versions, is this what it is for or does it delete the whole page, not just the current revision on screen?) or is that only something that developers can do?
No, "delete this page" always means "delete this page". To blank individual revisions requires mucking in the database directly at present.
It is a _technically_ simple matter, but policy is the question.
Deletion of page history must not be done lightly. Wikipedia has become incredibly delete-happy over the last year; something we (or at least I) really don't want to see is 'sanitization' of page histories by quietly dropping revisions that somebody doesn't approve of, lost in a general background of "deleted junk edit from newbie".
(Further, Wikipedia _is_ a grand experiment. There may be people doing their theses on the edit histories of particular Wikipedia articles a hundred years from now, and they'll be _sorely_ disappointed if we remove all the "vandalism" from the archives. Let's remove only what we _can't_ distribute -- the copyright problems -- and leave notice of their passing.)
Is there any possibility of putting a notice on the history pages to show they are there for _archival purposes only_?
I'm not sure I understand how that would be in any way different from their present purpose. Archival or not, we're distributing those revisions to the public.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)