[Foundation-l] History splitting (main namespace)

[Emanuele Casadio]

Hi there. We've got a problem on it.wikipedia.
Recently a sysop tried to delete the page [[it:Football Club
Internazionale Milano]] in order to hide a vandalism that should not
be available on the history page (copyright violation, blasphemies,
personal information, etc) but the page reached 5000 edits, so he got
an error.

I tried looking all over meta for a precedent but I wasn't able to
find any. We don't have an ''oversight'' user group on it.wikipedia,
and as I can see from the discussions, the community doesn't want any.
So, the problem now is: "how can we remove a certain vandalism from
the history"?

"Bingo, history splitting" someone said... We (literally) call this
procedure "un-historizing" a page. I don't know if you know what I'm
talking about, so I'll try to explain how it works.
There is a page called [[ABC]] and it has a lot of versions. We move
this page to [[ABC/History up to <DATE>]], block this page; then we
manually copy the last revision to the [[ABC]] page and put in the
"edit summary" box a sentence like: "This page was ''un-historized''.
To see the old history go there: [[ABC/History up to <date>]]".

This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure
be GFDL-compliant? I believe that the local community has to be free
to decide about local policies, but when there is the risk that a
local policy might not be GFDL-compliant, I think that asking before
acting is a reasonable approach.

Sincerely,

-- 
FollowTheMedia (it-N, en-2)