On Wed, 2002-10-09 at 16:28, Kurt Jansson wrote:

How do I delete old revisions? We have some former copyright violations that have been (or are beeing) rewritten now. But the old revisions should be deleted, I think.

Let's not. See

http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Avoid+Copyright+Paranoia

Think about google for a second. It stores copies of pages. But Google isn't worried about copyright infringement because it doesn't try to present those copies in any infringing way.

It's not copyright infringement to store a copy. It's copyright infringement to design your site such that the intentional use is to display copies. Since the intentional use of Wikipedia is the publication of the latest version of the entries, if the latest version of the entry has improperly copied material, that's possible infringement.

Copies buried in earlier revisions do not infringement make.

We can potentially make revisions with copyrighted material more private, but we don't need to purge them from the system.