[WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

Tue Dec 13 18:24:20 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern
>for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to
>study the phenomenon of vandalism.  For this, it seems more than enough
>to make such revisions available in some limited-access way.  There's
>just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable
>article history.
>  
>
But it's not all junk. The Seigenthaler vandalism wasn't noticed for 
four months because it wasn't a popular page, what if instead of the 
addition of a falsehood it had been the deletion of truths? That deleted 
material would have eventually vanished from history under a system like 
this and the vandalism would become uncorrectable.

It seems to me this sort of functionality would move the debates we've 
been having over deletion of articles down to the level of the deletion 
of individual sentences.