[Foundation-l] History splitting (main namespace)

[Platonides]

Emanuele Casadio wrote:
> 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,

I really recommend against it.
Stewards can delete big pages (and perform oversights there if needed).

Hopefully, we will have soon the per-revision deletion and that limit
will go away.