Oversight

Ceiling Cat has oversight over the entire universe, according to the lolcat bible translation project.

o·ver·sight (ō'vər-sīt')

n.

1. An unintentional omission or mistake.

2. Watchful care or management; supervision.

Oversight, now known as "revision hiding", is a process that is used in Wikipedia to be, in their own words, "a form of extreme deletion, intended for privacy, defamation and (at times) copyrighted information which are to be expunged from any form of usual access". It even removes info so that the Wikipedo admins cannot even see it, lol, because TOW has so many sysops that it can't trust all 1500 or so of them. Encyclopedia Dramatica, on the other hand, doesn't need oversight, only normal deletion (except when some sick fuck uploads child porn links or pix to ED, not realizing that is an offense worth a banning and a Party Van call), meaning that the dozen or so ED Sysops can see everything that has ever been entered into the wiki including dox.

Only a few dozen people on Wikipedia actually have the power to hide revisions from administrators. This makes it a huge effort whenever oversight truly is necessary, because the normal Wikipedos have got to grovel at the feet of those above them just to remove a bit of epic trolling. This makes oversight a very easy process to gain lulz from if you know how to play them at their own game.

Like most things on Wikipedia, oversight is commonly abused. Theoretically, oversighters have to follow these rules, but in practice, they can do whatever the fuck they want because only they can see the revisions they hid, so nobody else can challenge them. If you complain about oversight abuse, your complaint also gets oversighted, as can be seen here.

How to Invoke Oversight

The Dumb Way

Say you're going to carry out a school shooting or terrorist attack. Assuming you're not using Tor, the Wikipedos will identify you by your IP address and the party van will show up outside your door within five minutes (further information on this topic can be found here).

The Smart Way

1. Go onto 4chan's /b/ (4chan is by far the most preferable imageboard for this for a number of reasons. No banhammer for it, lots of newfags, and lots of people willing to do what you tell them.)

2. Make up some fake personal info. For example, "Lisa from Manchester UK gives great head; please call her on (+44) 07768 912385" (make sure it is a fake number like that one - the Wikipedos will still get upset about it though).

3. Spam every thread with a request to edit a Wikipedia page, preferably one with a long edit history, and replace it with this content.

4. Create a tinyurl with the libelous revision of the Wikipedia page that the first newfag edited because you told him to, on editing mode, then tell people to go to that tinyurl and click "Save page" (Grawp does this.)

5. Keep spamming that tinyurl save page bullshit.

6. Watch the page get protected and oversighted by butthurt Wikipedophiles getting worked up in a hot flush, especially if their username is Alison. Also, be sure to make your target page has many, many revisions in the edit history as MediaWiki makes it take much more time for sysops to restore all the revisions of a page with hundreds of revisions compared to a page with very few, because every revision has to be ticked individually in a checkbox for it to be restored. Large pages when deleted and restored can also cause the database to lockdown resulting in the Administrators' noticeboard being flooded with complaints as soon as editing comes back online.

7. ????

8. PROFIT

It is often best if you make your tinyurl links in the numbered "???? PROFIT" style to make them more appealing to channers, to deceive them into thinking there is a reward at the end, whereas actually you're just making tools of them, lawl.

Abuse

On July 2024 Wikipedia helped a known terrorist associate Sideswipe9th (dead name: Zoë "Lurking Spychologist" Hamilton) to hide facts about his involvement in bomb threats against Russian Azur Air flight 2463 in 2023 causing it to be diverted to Uzbekistan while flying from Russia to India. RUHH ROHH!

To avoid the FO phase he bribed many Wikimedia stewards to censor the unpleasant fact about him on various wikis that had by now contained passages about the bomb threat, such as it-wiki, hy-wiki and ja-wiki. Brief reversions of the censorships were made as well. However on Japanese Wikipedia the stewards faced mokukatsu for 57 hours, out of the possibility that the bomb threats were indeed made by Sideswipe9th, and that he is trying use the "being framed" defense to evade FO.

External links

• A complete list of oversighted edits from September 2002 to January 2008

Oversight is part of a series on Wikipedia Visit the Wikipedia Portal for complete coverage.