“Oversight” in Wikipedia

One of the newer developments in Wikipedia is the creation of a new “Oversight” class for a small set of Wikipedians, which would allow for really purging information from the database in Wikipedia.

There is a solid reason for this. In the interest of transprency, wikis store every edit ever made, even the vandalism, profane and libelous edits. This virtual “infinite undo” of Wikipedia provides for easy rollback of changes and for tracking the progress of articles. But this information (personal information, libelous or defamatory statements) in the edit history can be considered still “published” because it can be pointed to by a URL directly into the database. (See this for an example of vandalism still accessible in the edit history of the [[George W. Bush]] article)

It was for this reason that a limited number of folks among the Wikipedia administrators, developers and arbitration committee have the power to delete particular edits permanently, without any trace left in the Wikipedia database. Right now, there are 17 individuals with this capability. From the story from the Wikipedia Signpost, community newsletter:

A new revision-hiding user class, “oversight”, was created recently. Users with the function can permanently delete page revisions containing personal information, copyright violations, or libelous content.

The permission was created after a number of problems involving the current deletion process. The biggest problem was the insertion of inappropriate content including the phone numbers of administrators and potentially libelous information into revisions and edit summaries

Some have tried to portray this as a sinister move (”Is a Wikipedia priesthood attempting to erase history?“), but this has been a nagging problem for years that is finally being addressed with a real policy, rather than ad hoc database tinkering by Wikipedia’s developers and Jimmy Wales’ special requests.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 3:15 am and is filed under Wikipedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.