Wikipedia:Selective deletion

The software allows administrators to remove individual revisions from the history of a page. Since the introduction of the RevisionDelete tool, it is used only for handling complex page history merges - see .

Selective deletion is generally only done when the revisions contain personal information of a user or some other person (telephone numbers, etc.) or copyright violations. For most kinds of simple vandalism, merely reverting the page to a good version is considered sufficient.

Since deleting a revision effectively hides all traces of the edit ever being made, including the name of the editor who made it, doing so may violate the attribution requirement of the GFDL and CC-BY-SA — not to mention making the article history potentially misleading — if the deleted revision introduces any changes that are maintained in the following non-deleted revisions. Thus, selective deletion should be used very sparingly, and should not be used in cases where legitimate edits have been made between the time the unwanted content was added and the time when it was subsequently found and removed. In problematic cases, contacting a with direct database access may be necessary to sort out the history.

Deleted revisions are available to administrators only. In order to further restrict the visibility of revision, a request for oversight can be filed.

To avoid these problems, one of the following methods were used. The first method is somewhat simpler, but requires selecting lots of checkboxes. The second avoids this, at the cost of some extra steps especially if there are previously deleted revisions.

Another difference between these methods is that the former leaves an entry in the page history marking the page moves, while in the latter the only trace of the process is left in the deletion/move logs. Depending on the circumstances, having the moves shown in the history may or may not be desirable, but generally it shouldn't make much difference.

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