Commons:Oversight

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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: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


  1. Lar You can contact me via my email link, which works, see my user page.
  2. Raymond - You can contact me via email, see my user page.

Requesting oversight

To request oversight, contact any of the users listed above by email. If the information needs urgent removal and you do not get an immediate response, it may be necessary to contact a steward via IRC (#wikimedia-stewards) or email.

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