I am motly on Japanese Wikipedia, and I see really a lot of the same problem in there, too. I, too, hope that this feature is implemented as soon as possible, at least for Japanese Wikipedia.

We talk about this feature a lot in Japanese Wikipedia, and I am quite sure that many others from Japanese Wikipedia would agree that this is something we need.

Earlier, this idea of deleting particular version was discussed on the list, and it turned out that Some Wikipedias needed to reorganize deletion procedures & rules before adding such a feature, so that their admins will not abuse this function. [http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-June/010684.html]

Yet in the mean time, Japanese Wikipedia received/ revealed plenty of copyvio, some allegedly intentional, that forced us to delete the articles in many cases. Some such violation arrives at 100th edit (like at Main page, which indeed is listed at VfD right now), after all the hard work. Others are in the first versions of articles, but remain unnoticed until 5th edits or so, again making us very difficult to decide to delete the whole thing.

Another issue that I am aware is that English Wikipedia may be taking the stance, based on a provision in US copyright law, that past versions are not for public viewing but for internal record, and therefore copyright violation does not matter. That idea is so far considered not applicable to Japanese Wikipedia, because a Japanese copyrightholder can sue Japanese Wikipedian in a Japanese court and Japanese law could be applied.

The only alternative we had to cope with this problem was to ask developers to delete specific version of articles. But because of the server restructuring and other issues, no request was handled yet. (And let me quickly say that nobody is complaining about that, since we all think they work hard. But that makes us wonder about the appropriateness, and sometimes legal risk, of waiting for such a long time when there is a somewhat clear case of copyright violation. We may delete the article and start from the scratch, which, again, is not an easy choice at all.)

Currently, we have at least a few dozen pages whose past versions turned out to be problematic. Well, I really don't want to count, but really a lot was found during the last 4 or 6 weeks.

If anybody wants to know more about how the situation is like, I would be more than happy to do it, but I will stop here since it is not a very pleasant story...

Regards,

Tomos

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