[Wikipedia-l] Purging vandalism

lcrocker at nupedia.com lcrocker at nupedia.com
Thu Aug 29 18:41:52 UTC 2002


I got a request via email to purge the history records of our latest 
goatse.cx vandal, lest some poor unsuspecting wikipedian later come 
across them by accident.  While there may be arguments for keeping 
such a historical record, I think in this case they are outweighed by 
the benefits of just deleting them.  I did a database backup, just in 
case we get subpoenaed to produce them or something, and then I 
removed them.  The banned IP list clearly shows what happened, when, 
and why, so we aren't losing that information, just 54 edit records 
that were all reverted (interstingly, he also seems to have made 
exactly one legitimate edit, which is still here).

I thought the list should know when things like that are done in case 
there's some serious objection to it.








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