[WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

Tue Dec 13 20:35:43 UTC 2005

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Matt Brown wrote:
> > My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page
> > history so easily.
> 
> 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.

I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea: 

A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the
vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be
pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along
with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete
versions that are older than a week and would need to. This would clean-up page histories a great
deal and get rid of most of the libel and slander in them. Then, as needed, a human admin can
delete more versions since a great many reverts are not done by admins. A more sophisticated admin
bot could compare diffs to detect reverts (using the comments 'Reverted to last version by..' and
'rv' only to identify diffs to check). 

> 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 agree. 

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