Wikipedia talk:Revision deletion

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Previous discussion at Wikipedia talk:Selective deletion

Wording change in "Misuse" section

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The wording of this section was a bit impenetrable, due to some grammatical errors (most likely convoluted language by a well-intentioned but not-native-English-speaking writer, but maybe not). In the spirit of being bold, I've edited it [1]. I *think* I remember enough about RevDel's genesis to be reasonably confident I didn't misrepresent the intended interpretation. However, since wording of this policy more broadly has been a bit contentious, I'm highlighting it here for review by others. Feel free to revert or modify if I got the gist wrong or introduced some bias. Martinp (talk) 18:36, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit summaries for RD2

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In the spirit of WP:DNFTT, I was wondering if there has been discussion about cutting the edit summary for RD2 revdels (currently "RD2: Grossly insulting, degrading, or offensive material") down to just the link, or at least something less explicit. If someone is trying to be grossly offensive, this seems like it might provide validation. For those who are interested, clicking through to the link would still provide the relevant information. CMD (talk) 07:33, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I think the deletion log is obscure enough for this not to be a huge issue. You'd have to be relatively experienced in order to know how to find it (which most of us reading this page probably are, but the common-variety vandal probably isn't). Mz7 (talk) 00:53, 21 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

RevDel log visible to non-admins?

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Stupid question time - why is the RevDel log visible to non-admins and why does it appear on watchlists? I've several times seen people ask about the contents of deleted revisions, which is the result of a streisand effect that allowing non-administrators to view RevDels on watchlists makes. The point of RevDel is obviously to suppress or "hide" the contents of a revision, yet in doing that just makes us peasents more curious as to what was hidden. Why is it viewable to everyone, then? — EF5 18:20, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@EF5: I guess I'll toss in my two cents here since you never got an answer, and I think you raise an important issue. I'll start by pointing out that the oversight log (Special:Log/suppress) is non-public and only visible to oversighters—that takes care of the really serious cases where privacy is critical, where even the fact that something got hidden is something that needs to be obfuscated.
For revision deletion, I think we have to balance the desire for the broader community to be able to review administrator actions when needed. Revision deletion is for offensive or disruptive material that should be hidden from the general public, but isn't so bad that we would need to hide even the explanation for why the content was hidden from non-admins. I think you are correct that this may lead to Streisand effects when the log entry appears on watchlists, but I think for revdel-level content this is a trade-off that we are willing to accept (unlike oversight). If the revdel log was hidden, that might even cause yet another Streisand effect of people who watch a page asking why content was suddenly hidden because they can't see the reason for it in the log (sadly, we see this sometimes for oversightable content and is something oversighters have to constantly think about when deciding whether to suppress). Mz7 (talk) 02:59, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]