[WikiEN-l] Oh shit, Slashdot is an attack site!

[K P]

On 8/8/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On  0, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> scribbled:
> > Nope, I'm talking about an admin who recently oversighted much of his
> > talk page, then himself.  And it's not the first time I've seen it
> > happen.  And courtesy oversights are done for users all of the
> > time--and I don't mean "delete," unless by that you mean good-bye to
> > the page's edit history also.
> >
> > KP
>
> Uh, yes, I do. That's what deletion means. It's not just page blanking, but rendering inaccessible to admins all past revisions/page history. That's what it has always meant; courtesy deletions aren't sinister at all. I've requested and done them many a time.
>
> Oversight is deletion for admins; deletion where they aren't allowed to see what was deleted. The only 'courtesy oversights' I can think of is the usual OTRS and "personal information" stuff. (Well, that and embarrassing stuff like the original Seigenthaler article. That was deleted and moved and oversighted so many times I'm not sure it can be recovered even with oversight.)
>
> --
> gwern
> L34A1 Uziel Razor Avi AOL ISI Delta MI-17 B-52h/g garbage
>
So, explain this slowly, so I udnerstand.  There are actually three
levels of deletion, or maybe only two.  When a page history is deleted
so only the annoited can see what was there, that's just regular
courtesy blanking?  But, of course, not being one of the chosen, how
can I tell that that is the case?  All I can see is that one day there
is a page I posted on, and the next day that page, and my post, and
that page's history is completely gone.  How do I know, again, not
being among the annoited, that it hasn't been oversighted?  I don't.
All I know is the history is gone, the innocuous, had nothing to do
with conspiracies, history of a Wikipedia page is completely gone.

So, having a category of deletions that only the uber-privileged even
know whether that is it or not doesn't really mean anything.  The page
was blanked, access to its history removed from the peons, those lower
down pieces of doo-doo who are only good enough to, sometimes, write
the encyclopedia.

So, thanks for pointing out that I'm not good enough to know the
difference--this seems to be the Wikipedia day for pointing out there
are two solid classes of Wikipedians: those who are wanted, and those
who aren't.

KP