Wikidata:Oversight

This page documents a Wikidata policy. It is a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. All changes made to it (except for minor edits such as fixing typos) should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the project chat.

If you are a user who has a request for suppression, please note that details should not be posted in public. Email oversightwikidata.org or a local oversighter privately.

Oversight or suppression refers to hiding revisions, user names in edit histories and logs, or portions of individual log entries. This access is available to suppressors or oversighters (those in the 'oversight' or 'stewards' user groups). Oversighted data can only be viewed and restored by oversighters.

'Oversight' and 'suppression' are often used interchangeably; 'oversight' is derived from the older oversight extension, which has been deprecated in favour of the more flexible suppression feature in the MediaWiki core on Wikimedia wikis, and is not used on Wikidata.

Oversighters as of December 2024 (edit)

Email oversightwikidata.org; you can email one of the users below but that should be in addition to emailing the overall group address:

Ajraddatz (email), en, fr‑1
DannyS712 (email), en, he‑2, es‑2, zh‑2
KonstantinaG07 (email), el, en‑4, fr‑2

In emergencies (e. g. when no local oversighter is available), oversight requests can be referred to the stewards, who can be contacted at stewardswikimedia.org.

Policy

The Oversight feature is approved for use in four cases:

Removal of non-public personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, workplaces or identities of pseudonymous or anonymous individuals who have not made their identity public, or of public individuals who have not made that personal information public. This includes hiding the IP data of editors who accidentally logged out and thus inadvertently revealed their own IP addresses.
Removal of potentially libelous information either: on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel or when the case is clear, and there is no editorial reason to keep the revision.
Removal of copyright violations on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel.
Hiding of blatant attack names on automated lists and logs, where this does not disrupt edit histories. A blatant attack is one obviously intended to denigrate, threaten, libel, insult, or harass someone.

Note: Not all things which qualify under the above criteria must necessarily be oversighted.

Stewards can perform local oversighting in emergencies, during crosswiki oversighting, or if there are no local oversighters available.

Access

Requesting access

Oversight access is gained after a successful request for permissions, where the community evaluates the candidate's suitability to hold and use the tool. Oversighters must be at least 18 years old, of legal age in their place of residence, and willing to provide identification to the Wikimedia Foundation. They must also be familiar with the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy. When requesting access, candidates must advertise their request to the community by posting a notice at the project chat, administrators' noticeboard, watchlist, mailing list, etc.

The request must remain open for at least two weeks. After gaining consensus, and with at least 25 support votes and 80% of votes in favour, a bureaucrat will close the discussion and request access on meta:Permissions with a link to the discussion. On Wikidata, only existing local administrators are eligible to request oversight access. It is highly recommended to be identified to the Wikimedia Foundation before applying for access, although this can be done after the request is closed as successful.

IRC channel

There is a private IRC channel (#wikimedia-privacy) to which all stewards and oversighters who use IRC should have access. Contact any channel member to gain access; a channel manager will grant permanent access. Ask a steward if you need help gaining access.

Mailing list

There is a private mailing list (mail:wikidata-oversight) for case discussion and announcements. Only Wikidata oversighters are eligible to subscribe. At the request of the WMF, the emails are not publicly or privately archived on the servers.

Removal of access

Removal of oversight access can happen in any of the following circumstances:

By resignation;
After a successful request for removal of access, which can also be followed if the rights are not used for an extended period. These requests are considered successful if at least one third of the voters are in support of removal;
If administrator access is lost, such as due to inactivity.

In case of abusive use of the tool, the editor with the oversighter privilege will immediately have their access removed by a steward. This will in particular happen if actions are done routinely without a serious motive to do so (links and proofs of bad behavior should be provided). Suspicion of abuse of oversighter access should be discussed, and stewards may not decide to remove access on their own, although they can help provide information necessary to prove the abuse (such as logs). If necessary, and in particular in case of lack of respect towards the privacy policy, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation can be asked to declare removal of access as well.