[Wikipedia-l] Copyright violated in Talk (and article history)

[Daniel Mayer]

Tomos wrote:
>In Japanese wikipedia, the whole article gets deleted

>when some infringement is found (or when highly 
>suspected case is not cleared after some period). 
>Upon deleting a page, non-infringing text exist in 
>the past or current versions will be recycled - but 
>the revision history is gone. I don't know if this 
>practice will sustain if, say, someone does an 
>infringing pasting to an article with 100 revisions, 
>though.

OK so instead of theoretically breaking the law by
allowing infringing material in the article history
you are definitely breaking the law by destroying
attributions to the people who wrote the
non-infringing part of the article? The GNU FDL
/requires/ author attribution and the way we do that
is through the article history. Please don't delete
the history of an article that still has valid,
non-infringing text just because somebody at one time
added illegal text; having infringing text is a lessor
evil than destroying valid author credit. If and when
a copyright holder complains a developer can delete
the particular revision. No need to be too paranoid
about this. :)

>If adding a new function for deleting just a past
>version of an article is fairy easy, I personally 
>would like it to happen.

It sounds like it would be and I will be all for it.
However, there are more important things to do first
with the deletion management system to make it
scalable. And each revision deletion will have to be
easily undeletable by another Admin. Basic undeletion
(like we already have for entire article histories)
is, IMO, absolutely needed before regular Admins have
this ability. I have nothing against the developers
first making an easy to use user interface for them to
delete revisions though - and they always should have
the ability to permanently delete things (in cases of
slander and libel, for example). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com