Commons:Oversight
Page revisions can be "oversighted", so that they no longer appear in the page history, and can only be seen by developers and users with the "oversight" permission. The right is used to remove material that may give rise to legal challenges or to remove offensive or attack-based material from view, especially when concerning a person's real life identity, full name, address, telephone number etc.
Revision deletion
Oversighting is technically an old approach to the problem of removing information from public view, and now largely deprecated in favour of the more flexible suppression feature available in Commons' software since 2009, called "revision deletion". This tool is available to all administrators - see Commons:Revision deletion. However, oversighting is still available for extremely sensitive cases, as there are fewer users with access to oversighted information.
Users with Oversight permission
- Special:Listusers/oversight (see also Commons:Oversighters)
Requesting oversight
- If you need oversighter assistance on Commons, please email oversight-commons@lists.wikimedia.org with the diff links or page history link that should be suppressed and a clear explanation for such action. In an emergency, and if no Commons oversighter is immediately available, please contact a steward. Stewards should also be able to help if you need assistance with a cross-wiki problem .
