[Foundation-l] Oversight rights

[David Gerard]

On 20/12/06, Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:

> Recently, Tim enabled [[m:Oversight]] on all wikis (earlier it was
> only enabled on en: and test:). En en: the situation is "under
> control", as the Arbitration Committee handles and decides upon
> requests about oversight status. For other wikis, however, there are
> no policies on the matter, so we need to make one (since oversight is
> about the same level as checkuser). My suggestion is that we should
> use the checkuser requirements for oversight as well (e.g. more than
> 25 votes, 70%-80% support, at least two users meeting these criteria).
> What do you think about this?
> Also, I think a system should be established for stewards to perform
> oversight globallt, much like [[m:RfCU]]. However, since requests for
> oversighting will naturally be a lot more sensitive than requests for
> checkuser information, I think that we should use a mailing list for
> such requests, either using the existing oversight-l or stewards-l, or
> creating a new mailing list, for example oversight-requests-l or
> something like that, so that people can send their requests there, to
> be handled by stewards. Does that sound like a good idea?


Possibly. [[:en:Wikipedia:Oversight]] is the page that explains how to
request oversighting.

Note that oversighting is only for material so sensitive that not even
admins on the wiki should be allowed to see it. We have over a
thousand admins on en:, so are at a stage where we need this. It's not
for vandalism, copyright violations, etc. - only for material that
could be personally dangerous to someone.

The en: oversighters already say "no" to a lot of requests from people
who want to remove their own silly past edits from the record, admins
who don't want to hand-check lots of boxes to delete one bad revision,
etc.

I suspect most wikis won't actually *need* oversight as yet - en:wp
gets maybe one or two actionable requests a day.


- d.