Meta:Rewriting/Oversight policy

For documentation on using oversight or installing the extension, see mw:Extension:Oversight. This page describes Wikimedia Foundation policy.

Users with the Oversight class can remove revisions from an article's history. The revisions can only be restored by a developer.

Policy

Use

This feature is approved for use in three cases:

1. Removal of non-public personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, workplaces or identities of pseudonymous or anonymous individuals who have not made their identity public, or of public individuals who have not made that personal information public.
2. Removal of potentially libellous information either: a) on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel or b) when the subject has specifically asked for the information to be removed from the history, the case is clear, and there is no editorial reason to keep the revision.
3. Removal of copyright violations on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel.

Hidden revisions remain permanently inaccessible through the wiki. Therefore, they cannot be accidentally restored when a page is deleted and undeleted. They can only be manually restored by a database administrator, if a mistake was made.

Logging

The hiding of revisions is logged privately, visible only to other oversight users through Special:Oversight. The log lists who made the removal, when, from which page, and a provided comment. The contents may be reviewed by those with oversight rights, though the originally stated intention was that this will only be available for a limited time period. There is no longer any public logging, to minimize the leaking of private personal information.

Access to oversight

Only stewards and a very few editors are allowed to have the Oversight status. Editors will only have Oversight status locally.

On a wiki with a (Wikimedia-approved) Arbitration Committee (ArbCom), only editors approved by the Arbitration Committee may have oversight status. There must at least be two, so that they can mutually control their activity. After agreement, simply list the candidate on Requests for permissions.

On a wiki with no Arbitration Committee, two options are possible:

• The community must approve at least two Oversighters per consensus. Activity will be checked mutually. The user requesting oversight status must request it within his local community and advertise this request properly (village pump, mailing list when available, ...). The editor must be familiar with the privacy policy.After gaining consensus (80%) in his local community, with at least 25 editors' approval, the user should list himself under Requests for permissions with a link to the page with the community's decision.

• If a sufficient number of voters do not vote for two oversighters on a wiki, there will be no oversighter on that wiki. Editors will have to ask a Steward to remove the information if that complies with the above mentioned rules. To do so, simply send an email to oversight-l listing the pages, versions and information involved and explaining why you ask for such an oversight action (with links). You can also ask for help on #wikimedia-stewards on Freenode IRC. Do not mention the private information in the channel, but only when you have a private conversation with a steward.

Mailing list

For Wikimedia oversighters, there is a mailing list, oversight-l. This is a closed list. Use this list to ask for help, ideas and second opinions if you're not sure.

Unclear cases for oversight request by editors should be the object of a discussion with other oversight-editors.

Removal of access

Any user account with oversight status that is inactive on the project for more than a year will see their oversight access be removed (oversight itself may fortunately not need to be used and when this happens is unpredictable).

In case of abusive use of the tool, a steward may immediately remove the oversight access of an editor to prevent further abuse (and not restore it until a judgement has been made on the case). In particular, this will happen if use of the tool is done outside of the boundaries of authorized use.

Suspicion of abuses of oversight should be discussed on each local wiki. On wikis with an arbcom, the arbcom can decide on the removal of access. On wikis without arbcom, the community can vote on removal of access. Removal can be done by Stewards. The Stewards may not decide alone on removal (they can temporary remove access until a case is settled), but can help provide the information necessary to prove the abuse (log). If necessary, and in particular in case of lack of respect towards the privacy policy, the Wikimedia Foundation Board can request removal of access.

Complaints of abuse of oversight or privacy policy breaches may also be brought to the Ombudsman committee.

In case only one oversighter is left on a wiki, the community should elect a new oversighter (so that the number of oversighters is at least two). Until then, the access of the remaining user will be temporarily removed as well.

Users with oversight rights

All Wikimedia projects

Stewards can oversight edits via private request by email to stewards АТ wikimedia.org or IRC personal message. Please do not put your request on wiki or broadcast it on IRC.

long list commented out for now