On May 24, 2007, at 3:34 AM, Charlotte Webb wrote:
Generally speaking, that would violate the terms
of the GFDL, which
requires us to maintain documentation of all changes that are made.
Sometimes sloppy workarounds are used, such as pasting a dump of the
edit history (really just a list of usernames/IPs, timestamps, and
edit summaries) in a prominent location, such as the talk page (this
is usually used for pages that get transwikied to another project).
For this reason, I advocate deleting and rewriting from scratch in
cases where we feel
some significant portion of the history is problematic.
We do have the ability to write an amazing amount of material really
really quickly. The
feeling that we have to carefully save every word forever is outdated.
--Jimbo
The same problem is in Wikipedia:Copyright problems. Is it compliant with
the GFDL to clean up an article through a temporary page? Since this way it
looks like all the edits come from (usually) one editor, while the other
original edits are deleted. Which still are in the history for admins of
course but not for readers and mirrors. One example is
is>,
and many other examples since this is the usual way of cleaning up copyvio's
with the copyvio template.
See also