[WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

Tue Dec 13 19:09:30 UTC 2005

On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
<snip>
> 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.
>
> --Jimbo

The by far greatest argument I see against deleting such things from
page history is that by doing that you are infact deleting evidence of
bad user conduct. We need to see all that a user have done to be able
to judge them fairly, not only in RfCs and RfArs but also in such
things as Requests For Adminship and the like.

What if a user has been notorious in vandalising an article for a
short time, but only very, very few users have been aware of it (say,
a low profile page), and one month later an RfA comes up and some one
says "No way, this guy vandalised article X severl times a month ago".
The other users need to see proof of that from the history, and be
able to judge the users themselves!! Are we supposed to take these
other guys words for it that he is a vandal? No, we need to see the
evidence.

We also need to be able to judge the rollbacking admins actions, how
will we know if a rollback was warrented if the history is incomplete.

Then there are ofcourse arbcom hearings and RfCs, that's obvious too.

Delete only when absolutly necessary, keep EVERYTHING else in the
history. A complete history of everything that's happend is
fundamental to make wikipedia work.