Wikipedia:Oversight

The permission is granted by the Arbitration Committee after community consultation and significant review of the user's contributions. Users authorized for Oversight must be 18 years of age or older, must have passed an "RFA or RFA-identical process" and have signed the .

The original term "oversight" (for the function/tool) came from the , a revision removal function, whose log access was intended to allow oversight of its operation. The Oversight extension was intended to be a temporary measure; in 2009 the system was enabled which fixes several problems with oversight (including causing misattribution of edits and its irreversibility) and added features not originally present (including account and log hiding). For historical reasons, the group of users with the ability to use the RevisionDelete and Oversight tools are still known as "oversighters" and suppression might still be referred to as "oversight." However, "oversight" might refer specifically to use of the Oversight extension, while suppression will not.

This feature is approved for use in these cases:

In the following cases, revision and/or log suppression may be used when justified by the circumstances. However, consideration should be given to whether administrative revision deletion is an adequate response:

The original policy, containing only the first three criteria above, was adopted because the now-deprecated Oversight tool did not provide oversighters with the ability to restore oversighted revisions. The fourth criterion was adopted at in November 2009. The fifth criterion was adopted after the implementation of RevisionDelete which allowed suppression actions to be easily reversed.

Oversighters can perform the following actions:

Page revisions suppressed with the Oversight extension do not leave a placeholder in the page history and cannot be restored. Revisions suppressed with RevisionDelete leave a visible placeholder in the page history and can be restored if the situation calls for it.

Revisions that have been suppressed using were logged at Special:Oversight; however, this has been superseded with .

The RevisionDelete extension can be used by both oversighters and administrators. Oversighters may select whether RevisionDelete will be used as a suppression action that prevents administrator access, or as an administrator action that any administrator can see and modify; administrators only have access to the latter. The action will be logged in the or accordingly.

The logs list who made the removal, when, from which page, and a provided comment. A diff link to compare the previous live revision to the hidden one is available.

...
Wikipedia