On 08/08/07, ElinorD elinordf@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/8/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/08/2007, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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.)
Oversight is for material which would be personally dangerous or legally questionable to reveal. The key heuristic is: "should this material not even be available to admins?" We tend to err on the side of oversighting rather than not, fwiw.
For *almost everything* that shouldn't be visible to the general public, an ordinary deletion is quite sufficient - even if we had ten thousand admins, that's a lot less than making it accessible to billions.
- d.
But if a particular edit made on 17 June shouldn't be available to the general public, and an admin just deletes it and partially restores the page, but the edit isn't oversighted, and then on 19 July, another inappropriate edit is made, the admin who deletes and partially restores the page the second time is extremely likely to accidentally restore the edit from 17 June. Is that not the case? ~~~~
If we assume the admin is sufficiently incompetent not to have paid due care and attention, yes. I've made this sort of deletion before - often where the previous deleting admin was me, which helped - and whilst it needs two or three windows open in tabs and a lot of careful thought, it's certainly solvable as long as you're alert and not treating delete/undelete as a routine.
We probably need a *better* method for handling multiple deletion/undeletions, which would be better than more broad use of oversight. I believe one is in the pipeline which allows you to selectively delete revisions from the getgo, rather than have to delete the whole page and restore, which ought to make this situation moot.