[Wikipedia-l] De-linking; the recycle bin alternative to deletion

[Toby Bartels]

maveric149 wrote:

>But then there is the problem of badly named pages that resulted from
>typos or vandalism, such as the hypothetical [[DON QUIOTE LIKES CARROTS]] or
>[[When Derams May COme]]. It would be silly to keep a page history, even one
>hidden under an edit link, for a page title that will never become an article
>or even a redirect.

I don't think that these are really a problem.
Yes, it's certainly silly if these pages are kept around,
but it's also harmless, if we have plenty of room.
Since Wikipedia is faster now than when I first joined,
it seems to me that server speed increases faster than database size
(even though it increases discontinuously, in jumps),
so I'm not worried about loading the database with junk entries.

>There is also the problem of copyright violations that need to be removed for
>legal reasons.

Definitely.  But we need to deal with this anyway,
since many copyright violations are preserved in histories
of pages that were rewritten and thereby saved from deletion.
Instituting my proposal may exacerbate the copyright problem,
but that's good if it focuses our attention on it to get rid of it.
Thus, I suggested the feature of deletion of individual revisions
(to be used sparingly and slowly, as copyright violations are dealt with now).


-- Toby