On 08/08/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Here's what it is. Basically, you have normal editorial process, the way a wiki always works. You can add material, you can remove it; anything removed shows up in the edit history. You can blank a page completely in the current version, but you still have an old copy to fall back on.
Now, sometimes, just removing the offending text and letting people find it in the history is undesirable; you want shot of it properly. MediaWiki has a "deletion" feature, which takes the page (strictly, all revisions of the page) and marks them as not being visible. They're still there in the database, but are no longer visible unless you have the specific rights; it's reversible by undeletion. Deletions and undeletions are logged, and you can see - I think - how many revisions of a given page are currently deleted. You can't tell where those deletions "came" in the history - I think simply through the fact that this never got coded rather than any deliberate decision - which is faintly irritating.
There *used* to be the ability to view the timestamps and edit summaries of deleted revisions, but this was removed due to abusive use of edit summaries; there's a patch being worked on to try and get round this, but I'm not clear what happened to it.
The rights to delete, undelete, and view deleted revisions are handed out to admins; essentially, whilst we don't particularly want to *publish* this material, we see no reason not to have it "on file" to help us do various editorial roles. It's given only to admins because we have no actual mechanism (or community standing) for any kind of actively-determined user rights below that, and we don't want to give it out automatically for reasonably clear reasons!
"Oversight" is essentially *actually* deleting a revision; going out and nuking it from the database (or the next best thing to it). Replacing it may or may not be possible, and certainly isn't very practical. MediaWiki doesn't tell people there was an oversighted revision because, effectively, as far as it knows that revision never existed - unlike deletion, where it knows the revision existed, just got flagged "removed". There is an oversight log, which records the time and reason for oversighting, and what the revision was; this is kept private because the content is presumed sensitive.
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- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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A nice summary.