[WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

Wed Dec 14 18:00:29 UTC 2005

On 12/13/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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).

Bad idea.  I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for
things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread
implementations of bad ideas.  Most recent case: someone had modified
the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied
that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in
question.

--
[[User:Carnildo]]