Can someone remind me of the option available to certain Admins which allows them to remove edits from both articles AND article history?

Are you talking about the Oversight feature?

Greg

There's also the ol' delete-and-then-restore-only-#-revisions trick... Sort of like "Oversight Lite"...

The first (true Oversight, available to only about a dozen admins) leaves no evidence trail to the average user or (I believe) normal admins. Other Oversight users can see that an Oversight was done, but not the deleted information. The second, which Somey calls "Oversight Lite" is really just a version of deletion, and normal users can see that it was done (in the page deletion logs), and admins can see the deleted revisions.

Others here have, by looking through old Wikipedia database dumps, established beyond a shadow of a doubt that certain Wikipedia admins, notably Jayjg, have mis-used the Oversight tool to protect themselves and their friends from scrutiny and embarrassment. Jimbo has had some of his own (retrospectively embarrassing) posts Oversighted. Much info on this is here on Wikipedia Review, and other can be found in Wikitruth.info.

Oh, and welcome to WR, Cynick.

Wikitruth.info is a great site, but at the risk of appearing self-promotional, may I point out that the evidence of inappropriate oversights can be found on AntiSocialMedia.net.

Amazing Butt True Story —

When Wikipedia Admins get bored with the WP:IH (Internal Hairassment) of hapless at random Wikipedia contributors, one of their favorite reign-dear games is wheel warring over what kind of pic is featured at the top, er, bottom of this article.

Some wag who noticed Raul654's fascination with gluteal creases went and pasted a cameo of Raul654 in the featured frame.

It did get reverted, a surprisingly long time later, and only after getting rave reviews at this Review, butt Raul actually went to all the additional trouble of oversighting the offending edit, as you can tell if you track forward in the raw history display from the version shown above, where one edit line notes the reversion of an edit that no longer appears in the edit history.

So now you know all abutt what oversight is for — saving face.

Jonny

To spare WordBomb from the need to be more self-promotional, he is the one who has done most of the heavy lifting in this research, and deserves a great deal of credit. The restoration and mining of those dumps was no easy task. My apologies for omitting his site from my quick note.

A more interesting example of Oversight Abuse may be seen here — well, may be seen here the last time I looked —

Semeiotic&action=history

Semeiotic&diff=174861182&oldid=163798092


Notice that «KnowledgeOfSelf» — talk about irony — speaks of reverting the version by «Real World Apple» to the version by «JzG», but no such versions appear in the history. Indeed, an unknown number of other edits between 11 Oct 2007 and 30 Nov 2007 may also have been oversighted.

What about the much vaunted Akashic Records of Wikipedia?

What about Open Process?

What about Transparency?

Fughettaboutit …

The basic principle that you see in practice here is this —

The Cabal will do whatever it damn well pleases, it will falsify any article, it will falsify any discussion page, it will falsify any revision history, and it will do so for any inconvenience, great or small, that the annoyances of accuracy and truth may put in its way.

Jonny

Here's another example of the same thing —

Minimal negation operator&action=history

Minima negation operator&diff=174860858&oldid=146709894


In this case, all edits between 24 Jul 2007 and 30 Nov 2007, of which there were a very large number, have been wiped from the revision history.

Given a Cabal that feels perfectly free to tailor the historical record of the database to its liking, is there anything that is safe from their falsifications? — Is there any reason to trust anything in that database?

No, nothing is sacred if the truth is not.

Jonny

It wasn't oversight.

Look, I don't care what you call it — geeks can argue over that till they are green in the face

Are we clear about the fact that this is a falsification of the record that appears in the revision history?

Jonny

I was pointing out that it was JzG. Why does he have this obsession with you anyways? He obviously has no interest in philosophy or logic.

Of course I knew it was Guy Chapman behind it — even if he's not an overseer, how hard would it be to get some Cabalist to do his bidding? But thanks for the tip on an easier way to document the ToBeNamed Abuse.

Yes, it does seem passing strange that the very person who impugned my integrity all over the Wikienlist — accusing me of trying to warp WP:NOR just so I could adulterate the purity of Wikipedia's Unoriginality with what he lambasted as my Original Research — should be maintaining such a GawdAwful DeathGripe on the very work that so repulses his tender sensibilities.

Jon Awbrey

Dynamic Record —

All of this got me to looking at the deletion log for JzG, and sure enough he does a LOT of this Delete And Restore (DARing DOO).

So I began to wonder — could Guy Chapman be Wikipedia's most prolific‡ History Re*Writer, in a word, the Stephen King of Histortury Tellers? Or have we but dipped our pen in a much bigger well of industrial strength disappearing ink?

Jon Awbrey

‡ Prolific doesn't seem like quite the right word for the mode of production proper to an Eraserhead like JustZapitGuy, but I'll have let it go until I can find or make a better word of it.

Thanks for all the contributions, yes Oversight was the feature I had forgotten, and now I see the thread that I couldn't find earlier, "Uncovering track-covering".

I understand the need to remove copyright and libelous information, but not the reason to (a) remove the entry from the article history (b.) that Oversight does not leave a History entry, neither of which conflict with the official reason for Oversight.

I can't show you exactly where I read it, but as I was researching Oversight, I bumped into a comment by a member of ArbCom stating that Oversight was thrust upon them, nobody had asked for it, and at first they didn't even know whom to give it to. Eventually they settled upon the members of ArbCom itself.

I believe that happened on June 25, 2006, but have very strong evidence that Jayjg was (ab)using it as early as June 4, 2006. I'll tell you more about this if you care...it's really quite sordid.

I think Jayjg wanted Oversight primarily to remove edits that revealed his and SlimVirgin's sockpuppetry in such a way that hid it from rival admins who would use the information against them.

Edit: I found the reference to Oversight being handed down without warning here.

More sordid, please.

A fish rots from the head down.

So was it Danny who first arranged the creation of the Oversight tool? Do we know what developers/technicians were involved in implementing it? Why and how was Jayjg using it before the rest of the Arbcom even knew about it? Who told him how to use it?

The Oversighters have actually started Oversighted the revert edits as well, putatively to make the edit history unconfusing. That this makes it harder to tell that something was oversighted in the first place has not been discussed.

Well, not discussed in any place where you can still see the discussion.

Wikipedia Oeuvre-Seers — We're Not Just Transparent, We're Invisible !!!

Jonny