[Wikipedia-l] Re: Page deletion policy

[Brion VIBBER]

Pierre Abbat wrote:
> What about articles that have copyright violations in their history? I 
> recently found the source for two articles that were copied verbatim from 
> other websites. [[Miyuki]] can go poof, as far as I'm concerned (it's a bead 
> seller's account of a trip to a bead plant, and the article's an orphan), but 
> [[Guru Granth Sahib]] is important. Is there a way to remove the violation 
> from the sikhuence of versions while keeping the rest?

A particular revision can be dropped from the database. There's no 
interface for it, but it can be done manually by one of the developers 
if need be (ie, if we cannot legally distribute the material, which we 
are doing if it's in the history).

However, there doesn't seem to be anything in that particular article's 
history[1] besides the copyright violation, the copyright violation with 
a formatting correction, and a message explaining that there used to be 
a copyright violation in that place.

It makes perfect sense to me to delete the "article" outright, since 
there is no usable content in its history, and let someone add content 
to a clean new article of the same name later.

1: 
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Guru_Granth_Sahib&action=history

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)