Author: xkernigh
Description:
Previously at en.wikibooks.org, I could view the edit history of deleted
pages. For example, at
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Undelete/366_Photographs_on_the_Beach
I could see the edit history. Now, I get an error message: "The action you
have requested is limited to users with the "deletedhistory" permission
assigned. See [[Wikibooks:Administrators]]." (The
[[Wikibooks:Administrators]] page does not explain the error.) A user at
English Wikibooks with sysop priveleges reported that deleted history was
still visible to sysops. I have a normal user account without sysop
priveleges.
This sudden change in policy was not announced at English Wikibooks, at
Wikimedia Meta, or at foundation-l, however there was a wikitech-l thread
at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-December/033283.html
Quote from wikitech-l: "In the last few weeks we've gotten a rash of
complaints about edits being made with private, embarrassing, vandalistic,
libelous, etc stuff in the edit summaries etc, and of course deleting the
revisions from the wiki still shows them to everybody."
However, such edit histories are not normally visible, because you must
follow a special link to see them. Further, at English Wikibooks, I can
recall no such offensive edit summaries. Instead, I saw edit summaries by
users adding deletion-tags to the page, plus the reason why the sysop
deleted the page. Without "deletedhistory" permission, it is now more
difficult for me to determine why a page is deleted. (Many pages are
deleted simply because they transwiki to another wiki, not for any
offensive reason.)
I should be able to see deleted edit histories at English Wikibooks.
To reproduce this bug:
(1) Go to en.wikibooks.org
(2) Logout, or login as any non-sysop user
(3) Visit any deleted page and view its history (click "View 14 deleted
edits?"), for example
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/366_Photographs_on_the_Beach to
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Undelete/366_Photographs_on_the_Beach
- [[Wikibooks:en:User:Kernigh]]
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
OS: OpenBSD
Platform: Macintosh
URL: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Undelete/366_Photographs_on_the_Beach