[WikiEN-l] Oversight or RevisionDelete

[Luna]

 On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Andrew Turvey <
andrewrturvey at googlemail.com> wrote:

> In many cases, that makes sense. However, in this case, the sensitive
> material was only sensitive at the time - once the subject was released
> there was no continuing risk.
>
> As you mentioned, oversight wasn't necessary in this case. However, it's
> not inconceivable that another case where oversight is used might also be
> "temporarily sensitive". Perhaps, for instance, if it has been used in a
> suspected harassment that turns out to be something else.
>

Discussion here can get to be a bit confusing -- "oversight" can refer to
too many things. In the interest of clarity, I'll use "oversight" to refer
to the user priviledge, HideRevision to refer to the older oversight tool,
and RevisionDelete or RevDel to refer to the new tool -- oversighters have
access to both tools and their respective logs. By my understanding,
anything removed using HideRevision can't easily be viewed or restored,
except I believe with direct intervention by developer(s) with database
access; anything removed using RevisionDelete can be restored by any
oversighter, and can be viewed by oversighters (and sometimes admins,
depending on settings used at the time of suppression).

That covers a few raw technical aspects. In terms of policy and practice,
I'm not immediately aware of any cases where something deleted with RevDel
has later been restored, nor am I confident at first impression that doing
so would ever be wise. I certainly would be loathe to do so, absent perhaps
cases of obvious mistakes or egregious abuse (think compromised accounts,
say), and definitely not without relevant precedent or prior discussion.

I might be thinking of something you're not, though -- from personal
experience with the tools, the majority of cases I see are terribly mundane,
"Foo is dumb and his phone number is xxx-xxx-xxxx" types.

-Luna