[WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

Tue Dec 13 17:25:07 UTC 2005

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Jimmy Wales wrote:

> My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing
>
>vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go
>through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the
>history, I would strongly support that we do so.
>
>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.

I suspect that scouring the edit history of vandalism might be more
trouble than it's worth. Consider that it's sometimes difficult to
tell if an edit is vandalism or not.  Before you know it, you'll have
an "Edits for deletion" voting system in place, because everyone wants
to have a vote in making sure that only real vandalism gets deleted.
Otherwise, it will be entirely up to the deleting admin, who is likely
to make mistakes.

On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to view the edit
history of [[George W. Bush]] and actually know who has been editing
the article and not vandalising.  Here's an idea: How about instead of
deleting vandalism outright, users (or admins) can mark an edit as
"vandalism/vandal revert" and there would be an option (on by
default?) not to view these marked edits on the edit history?  (A
possible function of admin rollback would be that it would mark all
rolled-back edits as vandalism.) That way we could preserve all edits
for posterity but people could still get work done.  You could even
keep track on a user-by-user or ip-by-ip basis how many edits had been
marked as vandalism.

Of course, blatantly libelous edits that contain personal information
(phone numbers, addresses) should be deleted.  But I think this would
be better than trying to clean up the bulk of all vandalism.

Ryan
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