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Wikipedia:Revision deletion

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Criteria for redaction

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A certain low degree of inappropriate or disruptive posting is normal within a large community. In general, only material that meets at least one of the criteria below should be deleted. Users should consider whether simply reverting or ignoring would be sufficient in the circumstances. If deletion is needed, only redact what is necessary (i.e. leave non-harmful fields visible), and give a clear reason for the removal.

The community's decision[when?] was that RevisionDelete should not be used without prior clear consensus for "ordinary" incivility, attacks, or claims of editorial misconduct. The wider community may need to fully review these at the time and in future, even if offensive.

  1. Blatant copyright violations that can be redacted without removing attribution to non-infringing contributors. If redacting a revision would remove any contributor's attribution, this criterion cannot be used. Best practices for copyrighted text removal can be found at WP:Copyright problems and should take precedence over this criterion.
  2. Grossly insulting, degrading, or offensive material that has little or no encyclopedic or project value and/or violates our biographies of living people policy. This includes slurs, smears, and grossly offensive material of little or no encyclopedic value, but not mere factual statements, and not "ordinary" incivility, personal attacks or conduct accusations. When pages with grossly improper titles are deleted, the page names may also be removed from the delete and page move logs.
  3. Purely disruptive material that is of little or no relevance or merit to the project. This includes allegations, harassment, grossly inappropriate threats or attacks, browser-crashing or malicious HTML or CSS, shock pages, phishing pages, known virus proliferating pages, and links to web pages that disparage or threaten some person or entity and serve no other valid purpose, but not mere spam links.
  4. Oversightable information – see separate section below for criteria.
  5. Valid deletion under deletion policy, executed using RevisionDelete. With the exception of fixing cut-and-paste moves and history merges, if selective deletion is required, RevisionDelete is usually preferable (see "RevisionDelete compared to traditional selective deletion", [1]), and should be used instead of the old method of "delete and then partial undelete". It is important that the underlying reason for deletion be made clear in the log summary.
  6. Non-contentious housekeeping including correction of clear and obvious unintended mistakes in previous redactions, changes to redaction based upon communal discussion and clear consensus, adding information to the delete logs, and converting traditional selective deleted edits to RevisionDelete. (The action must not be likely to be contentious or controversial; consult if needed)
AC. Deletion mandated by a decision of the Arbitration Committee. At times the Arbitration Committee may determine that a logged item was sufficiently improper that the record should be formally deleted in the public log. The deletion reason should clearly link to the decision. Deletions under this criterion are considered to be Arbitration Enforcement matters and should not be overturned improperly; they may however be appealed.

Log redaction

Log redaction (outside of the limited scope of RD#2 for the move and delete logs) is intended solely for grossly improper content, and is not permitted for ordinary matters; the community needs to be able to review users' block logs and other logs whether or not proper. Due to its potential, use of the RevisionDelete tool to redact block logs (whether the block log entry is justified or not) or to hide unfavorable actions, posts and/or criticisms, in a manner not covered by these criteria or without the required consensus or Arbcom agreement, will usually be treated as abuse of the tool.

Hiding oversightable material prior to Oversight

Personal information includes almost any material that is (or looks like it might be) actual claims, facts, hints, or allusions to non-public, personal, or private information (see WP:SIGHT and WP:OUTING).

It does not matter whether the privacy-breaching material was posted by the user themselves or by a third party, whether in good or bad faith, recently or in the past, whether accurate, whether the target is identifiable to the administrator, nor whether it is a statement, pointed speculation, or implied.

RevisionDelete can be used to hide any privacy-breaching and/or defamation posts while waiting for Oversight. Since Oversight is not immediate, an administrator may provisionally delete the information from public view to minimize harm, then promptly contact an oversighter.

Even if the material is ultimately found not to be suppressible, administrators are allowed to err on the side of caution, even in cases with an apparent conflict of interest, provided it is in good faith and they quickly seek oversighter review. If the oversighter decides suppression was not appropriate, the material will be restored or admin-deleted instead.

Administrators should be aware that delete logs are public and scrutinized. Deletion may lead to extra attention at times. Only administrators can see the material when it is RevisionDeleted (and before oversight), but even so it may sometimes be more discreet to contact oversighters directly, and not use RevDelete first. A lot depends on the material itself. If RevisionDelete is used, avoid obvious suggestive terms in the reason (e.g. don't use "RD4", "oversight", "private material", "hiding IP of logged out user", etc.).

When hiding personally identifiable information related to an individual who can be contacted by email, it may be considered good manners to notify them that the information was deleted and hidden from public view. Providing such notice is at the administrator's discretion.

Notes on use

It does not matter if the target is identifiable, just that it appears to have a target:

It is not necessary that the target is identifiable. It is sufficient that it appears to refer to some real person, organization, or group, or could be intended to suggest a specific target to the right reader. For example a smear could target a person known locally by a nickname or other allusion that no Wikipedia administrator has heard of, but that is recognizable to people in that school, town, or social community. It is therefore not necessary the target(s) be identifiable, to treat the situation as if a target exists.

Username hiding (copyright attribution issues):

Wikipedia's licenses require that accessible edits be linked to the user who performed them, so it is generally a problem to hide the username from a revision while leaving their edited changes to the page in public view. Cases where it is acceptable are those where the revision contains no valid information copyrightable to the user who posted it (i.e. plagiarism, gibberish, vandalism, adding categories, no copyrightable change made to revision text, etc), where all changes will be reverted, or where the user accidentally posted while being "logged out" and the aim is protection of privacy at the request of the user.

High-traffic pages:

If redaction may be required on a busy page it can sometimes be worth an edit to take care of problematic text. If redaction is eventually required, fewer revisions will be affected.

Large-scale use

RevisionDelete is mainly intended for simple use and fairly recent material. Text that exists in numerous revisions (e.g. on busy pages) or which has been the subject of many others' comments may not be practical to redact. Redaction of such material should take into account how practical and effective redaction will be, how disruptive it would be (e.g. to others' valid posts), and whether redaction will itself draw attention to the issue. No hard line exists; judgment is required.

Administrators in this situation may wish to initially edit the page to revert or remove the grossly improper material, and then consult.

How to request Revision Deletion

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To request revision-deletion for copyright violations, see Template:Copyvio-revdel.

To avoid the Streisand effect, there is no dedicated on-wiki forum for requesting revision deletion under other circumstances. You can send a message to any administrator in Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to handle RevisionDelete requests either at their talk page or by email, especially if privacy is a concern. You can also request revision deletion on IRC using #wikipedia-en-revdel connect, where only administrators will be able to see your request (if you don't have an IRC client, click the green connect button to launch web-based IRC; for more information, see WP:IRC). Keep in mind that if the revision you're reporting could be subject to oversight, follow the procedures at WP:Requests for oversight or email [email protected].

Appeal and discussion of actions

Actions performed using this tool remain visible in the public logs. They are subject to review by other administrators (who can see redacted material), and to reversal upon clear, wider consensus. Such a review should take place at the Administrators' Noticeboard. As with other administrative tools, good judgment and appropriate use are expected; improper use can lead to sanctions or desysopping.

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See also

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