[Foundation-l] misleading advice on oversight on wikizine

[Dmcdevit]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> I disagree. There is an increased need for oversight (it's marginal,
> though). Before, when one of the 3 situations you quote came up we had
> a choice between oversight and simple deletion. Simple deletion was
> find in the less sensitive cases. Now, for large pages, that option is
> gone, so oversight will need to be used in every case, that results in
> a greater need for oversight.
>   

There is no room for disagreement here. Oversight is an extreme tool 
governed by a Board-supported policy on its use, which involved 
immediate loss of privileges for misuse. Oversight is not simply 
deletion of a single revision, it is the removal of that revision 
entirely from the history so that not even any administrator can see it 
or even see a log that it was done, and it can only be reversed with the 
help of a developer. We can certainly say that we hope that 
single-revision deletion becomes easier with new features added to 
MediaWiki in the future, but it is inappropriate to suggest that 
oversight can fulfill this role.

Dominic