Commons:Oversight
From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
This page is a proposed Commons guideline, policy, or process.The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".
Page revisions can be oversighted, so that they no longer appear in page history, and can only be seen by developers. The right is used to remove material that may give rise to legal challenges or to remove offensive or attack based material from view, especially when concerning a person's real life identity, full name, address, telephone number etc.
At this time images can not be oversighted, though there is an open bug request on that issue.
Contents |
Policy
Use
This feature is approved for use in three cases:
- Removal of non-public personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, workplaces or identities of pseudonymous or anonymous individuals who have not made their identity public, or of public individuals who have not made that personal information public.
- Removal of potentially libellous information either: a) on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel or b) when the subject has specifically asked for the information to be removed from the history, the case is clear, and there is no editorial reason to keep the revision.
- Removal of copyright violations on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel.
Hidden revisions remain permanently inaccessible through the wiki. Therefore, they cannot be accidentally restored when a page is deleted and undeleted. They can only be manually restored by a database administrator, if a mistake was made.
Logging
The hiding of revisions is logged privately, visible only to other oversight users through Special:Log/suppress (previously Special:Oversight). The log lists who made the removal, when, from which page, and a provided comment. The contents may be reviewed by those with oversight rights, though the originally stated intention was that this will only be available for a limited time period.
Users with Oversight permission
Requesting oversight
- If you need oversighter assistance on Commons, please email oversight-commons@lists.wikimedia.org with the diff links or page history link that should be suppressed and a clear explanation for such action. In an emergency, and if no Commons oversighter is immediately available, please contact a steward. Stewards should also be able to help if you need assistance with a cross-wiki problem .
