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.