User:Ryan Postlethwaite/New admin school/Deleting revisions

Sometimes, for reasons such as removing libelous material, people's names when disclosed by others, BLP policy violations, and other such privacy concerns, revisions of pages, not the whole page must be removed. This page presents a how-to, followed by a list of important points. Please read the whole please before making any changes! To do this you firstly delete the page in question in its entirety, using a summary such as "Back soon - cleaning history". Then, go to the undeletion interface (usually a link is presented on the deleted page), and you will see the deletion log, followed by a box in which you can undelete the page and enter a comment, followed by a list of revisions, each accompanied by a checkbox. By default, these checkboxes are unchecked, and if you restore the page using the interface with all of the boxes unchecked, you will in fact restore all of the revisions. So, in order to do a selective restore, we must check the boxes by all of the revisions which are "safe". It is wise to check the content of revisions surounding the known "bad" one by clicking on the timestamp for that revision, which will bring up the wikitext (which can then be previewed). Even on fairy small pages, it can take a very long time to check all the revision checkboxes, so it can be wise to seek out an appropriate extension for Firefox, or to find some javascript. Once you have a perfect version of the page history in front of you, enter an appropriate comment as the undeletion summary, and click "restore" to process the restoration.


 * Points to remember
 * Don't use this method on pages with large histories! Doing so could cause massive database strain, and make the servers cry.
 * Make sure that you remove all revisions containing the unsafe material (these should be identified before you delete the whole page by using the diff system)
 * If you do have to delete many revisions, be careful not to allow GFDL violations to occur. This would happen if:
 * Editor A added bad material
 * Editor B was edit conflicted, and resaved adding a load of new content of his
 * Editor C removed A's edits, leaving B's, and requested a history clean
 * If the page were to be history cleaned, A's edit and B's edit would have to be deleted, which would then leave B's addition attributed to C. In this case, it's probably best to avoid deleting any revisions.
 * Revision deletion is only really to be used for serious abuse of editing privileges, and usually its purpose is better served by Oversight. Revision deletion is still valid for use where items don't quite meet the threshold for oversight, or as a precursor to oversight (removing the revisions from sight until one of the oversighters(?) can get around to removing them further)