[Wikipedia-l] A possible solution to the deletion problem.

Tue Sep 24 09:37:30 UTC 2002

Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> --- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at 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)