I think one of the issues here is that we are not all using the same
terminology.
"Hiding", on English Wikipedia, is generally reserved for some weird
extensions that had to have special features built in because
revision-deletion, deletion, and suppression did not work with them. I
think all of those extensions are now disabled on English Wikipedia.
"Revision-deletion" (which has the effect of removing a revision from the
view of the reading public and users who are not administrators or
equivalent) or complete page deletion is used for most copyright violations
on English Wikipedia. Copyright violations should not be publicly
available, since it does not meet even the most basic requirements of edits
to the project; I have a hard time seeing why any project would leave them
in the page history, since that is the equivalent of leaving them in the
project.
"Suppression" is an even higher-level form of revision-deletion that
removes the revision from the view of everyone except oversighters. It
replaced the old "oversight" extension in 2009, and it is my understanding
that all of the revisions that were historically removed using the
oversight tool have now been returned to page history and suppressed.
(There are some exceptions.) Suppression is used on English Wikipedia for
most personal information, which can include anything listed in the WMF
privacy policy.
There are variations in the use of the deletion/suppression tools: for
example, since 2009 we have been able to either "delete" or
"suppress"
usernames and edit summaries that are highly inappropriate. The ability to
"suppress" usernames is sometimes used when someone edits while logged out,
not realizing their IP address will appear in the history.
I suspect that English Wikipedia has lower thresholds for both
revision-deletion and suppression because it has historically been the
project that is most abused, sometimes in ways that I'd be hesitant to
publicly describe.
Risker/Anne
(English Wikipedia oversighter)
On Mon, 14 Jan 2019 at 12:29, effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
This is one of these things that seems particularly hard to find, so I'd
like to pick your collective brains on this:
What are the various policies across our little universe on using the 'hide
version' functionality to hide historical versions of articles? I would
especially appreciate it if you could elaborate a bit on how it's used in
practice with regards to privacy violations (what is the threshold of
private information that would justify hiding versions) and copyright
violations (when do you actually hide the versions, rather than just remove
it from the current version and leave it in the history).
Are there any global policies on this? I think not, but always better to
double check :).
Best,
Lodewijk
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