[Licom-l] Deleted Content

Mon Apr 20 15:52:45 UTC 2009

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Assuming I understand the question correctly (always a good caveat in these
> discussions), I would distinguish conceptually between "republished" and
> "restored."  One possible interpretation, given this distinction, is that an
> MMC may include an edit history that contains deleted content, but the MMC
> itself remains published (or is republished), and the relicensing  applies
> to everything in it, including the edit history, including deleted content.
>
> I think this may be the interpretation that involves the least amount of
> administrative overhead.
>
> What do you think?

Mike,

I'm not entirely sure I understand the scope of your response.  Rather
than speaking in abstract, perhaps it would be helpful to have a
concrete (but fictional) case to frame discussion.

Suppose a group of people are fans of the garage band Filthy Badgers.
They create a Wikipedia page to celebrate the band.  It is a pretty
good page with interesting content, but because the band doesn't meet
Wikipedia's notability criteria for musical groups it is deleted.  At
this point the band's article and its edit history are hidden from the
public.

Now, we go forward with relicensing.  Our live content is transformed
from GFDL to GFDL + CC-BY-SA.

Months later, say in December, suddenly the Filthy Badgers hit it big.
 Overnight superstardom, record deals, huge publicity, the works.  Now
the Badgers really are eligible for a Wikipedia article.

At this point, we would be interested in undeleting the Badgers'
original article to use as a seed for covering the band.

Can we take that original article, written in the GFDL era and never
live during the republishing window, and still restore its contents in
the GFDL + CC-BY-SA era?

-Robert