[Foundation-l] Delete of Article History and GFDL

[Charlotte Webb]

On 9/15/08, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> By the way, an example of a time when an edit *should* be
> oversighted/deleted without being reverted first:
>
> User A creates a BLP.
> User B adds confidential information about the subject of the biography.
> Users C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J make positive contributions to the BLP.
>
> Then the confidential information is discovered.  To delete the confidential
> information you have to delete the revisions created by users B, C, D, E, F,
> G, H, I, and J.  You could do this by reverting to the version by User A,
> but why in the world *should* you be forced to do that?

One approach (which is already being discussed if I read correctly)
would be to keep the "positive contributions" listed in the edit
history but not viewable except by oversighters (because they
incidentally contain badstuff).

This would preserve GFDL attribution without needing to add any
non-standard (non-machine-readable and most likely to be ignored by
mirrors/re-users of the content) addenda on the talk page or
elsewhere.

Attribution info required by the GFDL:
*Who (username, can be forcibly renamed if it causes problems)
*When (year -- full timestamp is actually optional, but cannot
possibly cause problems)

Optional information can be de-activated if it creates problems:
*What (text of each revision)
*Why (edit summary)
*How ("...using AWB", etc.)

Also those who care about their edit count would also avoid penalty
for picking the wrong article to work on. :P

Caveat: Making it obvious that something has been removed makes it
easy to obtain from a database dump if one is successful produced
after the badstuff was added but before it was removed. It is my
understanding that successful database dumps are becoming increasingly
rare.

Has anybody ever thought about doing split dumps instead? If there is
an emergency where a few lines need to be urgently removed from a
database dump it would be more efficient to work with smaller files
rather than one big one which has everything since the dawn of time,
which very few people will want, and which is greater than the
combined GB of all hard drives I've owned.

And anybody who has an ongoing need for ALL PAGE REVISIONS would
probably rather use incremental dumps than delete and download
everything from scratch.

—C.W.