4 ms·

All the editing history is archived, right?

by slig 16y ago

iamwil 16y ago
Who digs through editing history when they're looking stuff up? And he's talking about the number of articles, if I'm not mistaken.
- slig 16y ago
  I thought that, since all the edits were kept in the database, more harddrives wouldn't matter. But as kens pointed out, that is not the case.
xenophanes 16y ago
Some stuff is never written because people know it would be deleted. Other stuff becomes harder to find (do deleted articles come up on searches..?)
- uriel 16y ago
  > Some stuff is never written because people know it would be deleted. Or simply, knowing that it is likely to be deleted puts you off from contributing at all. I know that is one of the main reasons I have almost completely stopped contributing to Wikipedia.
kens 16y ago
No, normal users cannot see deleted articles or their edit histories (which I think is crazy). Only Wikipedia administrators can see this information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Access_to_deleted_pages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Acces... says: Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. However, they remain in the database (at least temporarily) and are accessible to administrators, along with their edit history unless they are oversighted. Any user with a genuine reason to view a copy of a deleted page may request a temporary review (or simply ask an administrator to supply a copy of the page). Note that these requests are likely to be denied if the content has been deleted on legal grounds (such as defamation or copyright violation), or if no good reason is given for the request.
- klipt 16y ago
  > Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. But if defamatory material is added to a popular article and reverted away, doesn't it remain in the edit history forever?
  - bdonlan 16y ago
    I believe there are ways to hide portions of the edit history as well - they usually don't bother to do this if it's only part of a larger article, but if necessary, it can be done.
cmod 16y ago
Slightly tangential but James Bridle's printing of an article's history is an interesting kind of archiving: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/ http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

All the editing history is archived, right?

by slig 16y ago

All the editing history is archived, right?

Who digs through editing history when they're looking stuff up? And he's talking about the number of articles, if I'm not mistaken.

slig 16y ago
I thought that, since all the edits were kept in the database, more harddrives wouldn't matter. But as kens pointed out, that is not the case.

xenophanes 16y ago

Some stuff is never written because people know it would be deleted. Other stuff becomes harder to find (do deleted articles come up on searches..?)

uriel 16y ago
> Some stuff is never written because people know it would be deleted. Or simply, knowing that it is likely to be deleted puts you off from contributing at all. I know that is one of the main reasons I have almost completely stopped contributing to Wikipedia.

kens 16y ago

No, normal users cannot see deleted articles or their edit histories (which I think is crazy). Only Wikipedia administrators can see this information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Access_to_deleted_pages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Acces... says: Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. However, they remain in the database (at least temporarily) and are accessible to administrators, along with their edit history unless they are oversighted. Any user with a genuine reason to view a copy of a deleted page may request a temporary review (or simply ask an administrator to supply a copy of the page). Note that these requests are likely to be denied if the content has been deleted on legal grounds (such as defamation or copyright violation), or if no good reason is given for the request.

klipt 16y ago
> Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. But if defamatory material is added to a popular article and reverted away, doesn't it remain in the edit history forever?
- bdonlan 16y ago
  I believe there are ways to hide portions of the edit history as well - they usually don't bother to do this if it's only part of a larger article, but if necessary, it can be done.

cmod 16y ago

Slightly tangential but James Bridle's printing of an article's history is an interesting kind of archiving: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/ http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/