[Wikipedia-l] Purging vandalism

[Toby Bartels]

LDC wrote:

>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).

Someday we will have a regular policy on
removing copyright violations from the history,
and it'll be a shame if this says "or pornographic"
(or if the history is incomplete in unadvertised ways).
So you can put me down as wanting these returned.

However, I can certainly see my way to accepting
that they stay off until external images no longer work.
We *are* going to stop those from working, right?


-- Toby