I wouldn't use the phrase "Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages". Quite a few "deleted" pages do actually get restored, and depending on the deletion process it can be quite easy to get much deleted content back. Especially if someone volunteers to reference an unreferenced page or a budding footballer actually gets to play at professional or international level, or indeed a political candidate is elected. Almost all "deleted" content still exists and could be restored by a volunteer admin in the right circumstances. However Wikipedia's deletion processes are more than a little complex, many articles have incomplete histories because admins have revision deleted particular revisions that include copyright violations and or some really libellous stuff. Some of the really nasty stuff gets "oversighted" - those revisions are not even visible to administrators.
There is also the issue that some of the earliest material is not available. stats on admin actions only go back to December 2004, and while there is some content from before then, I am not sure if all the stuff deleted before then is available. Regards WSC On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 10:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) <[email protected]> wrote: > Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29: > > local instances of MediaWiki, > > enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion. > > Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you > considered using historical dumps? > > «We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and > modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is > inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the > entire history of deleted pages.» > > A relevant task is > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851 > > See also the various discussions about Memento, like > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654 > > Federico > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
