Stephen Gilbert wrote:
--- Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu wrote:
There are many copyright violations hidden in pages' histories now, and we are technically in violation of copyright for having them, however unobvious it may be for somebody to get to them.So we need to do this anyway, as has been suggested before. Only sysops would be able to do this, with a "del" link next to the "diff" and "cur" links in each page's history.
I agree with most of your proposal, but I'm not sure of this part. I do agree with the need to remove copyright violations. I am concerned, however, that people may be too quick to use this function. We've had many cases where one Wikipedian believed a text to be under copyright, but it was actually contributed by the copyright holder. If such a feature was put in place, we would have to develop a fairly strict policy on why and how to use it.
Unusable content in particular revisions can be plucked out manually by a developer (currently me, Lee, Magnus) if the appropriateness is established. For instance, see the history for [[New Jersey Turnpike]].
I'm dubious that it's something we'd want to do all the time, though. Permanent deletion isn't supposed to be easy.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)