Brion Vibber wrote:
A couple months ago the software got tweaked to display history info (but not contained text) of deleted revisions to any and all random visitors. In the last few weeks we've gotten a rash of complaints about edits being made with private, embarrassing, vandalistic, libelous, etc stuff in the edit summaries etc, and of course deleting the revisions from the wiki still shows them to everybody.
For the moment I'm shutting off this ability (restoring the pre-August behavior) until we get more fine-grained revision deletion / scrubbing in place. I've added a permission key to control it, 'deletedhistory', so if there's a need to turn it back on this can just be added to the '*' pseudogroup in the config to restore the previous behavior.
For me what is perhaps a tangential issue relates to articles that are transwikied to Wiktionary from Wikipedia. These are sometimes accompanied by long edit histories copied onto the talk page which are nothing more than user names and date/time marks, but no indication about whether these edits had anything to do with what we use on Wiktionary. It follows from the principle that Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia that Wiktionary accepts many articles that would be rejected as stubs by Wikipedia. Is there any way to know just what each of those edits were?
Personally, if I adapt a transwikied article I will completely rewrite it using independant source information, assuming that the information was sourced at all, but some others are content to just use the move function to adopt articles. I regard transwikied articles as being in a sort of limbo, where one cannot accept that Wikipedia is a proper soource for these, especially if the Wikipedia decision was to delete the article.
Ec