advanced wikipedia techniques: really deleting things
ok so if you're reading Wikipedia and you see obvious vandalism you can almost always just delete it from the page. There's also the page history, which tracks the state of every page after every edit, and you can use that to go back and undo an edit, which is often more effective. The problem with this is that even if you undo something it's going to be in the page history forever, which is a problem in the case of particularly vile stuff and, like, doxxing.
Wikipedia does have a solution to this and because Wikipedia is a website that has been running mostly autonomously for decades it's kind of a mess and also handled almost entirely by volunteers. Basically, there's this thing called Revision Deletion where admins can hide old versions of pages from public view, but other admins can still see them and undo that. There are kind of a lot of admins, so that's not really deleted, which is why there's also Oversight, which is handled by a separate and much smaller "Oversight Team", and is basically the same thing except only Oversighters (who also happen to mostly be volunteers, just very trusted ones) can see and undo the deleted revisions.
Practically speaking as a reader it is way too confusing to work out which of these two systems you're supposed to use for any given thing that should definitely be redacted somehow, and I reckon most people don't even know they exist. Like if you want to request Revision Deletion you've got to find an admin on the list who's active right now (which is a horrible task), and email them specifically, or maybe do it on IRC?* But, er, "Only use [the IRC channel] for requests that are urgent and should not be handled publicly" - wait isn't that everything you'd be requesting revision deletion for anyway? I swear it's as if the help pages for revision deletion are designed to confuse editors and waste their time when they really should just go directly to emailing the oversight team. I've done this before and it has been remarkably efficient. I still find it a little weird that the deletion of very much "this should be deleted or the website will be in legal trouble" stuff is handled by people who apparently don't have much to do with the Wikimedia Foundation itself, but I'm sure it's fine.
* using IRC leaks your IP address, which nowhere in this process are you warned about. This is funny because one of the types of information explicitly listed as being eligible for Revision Deletion is your own IP address if you're an active editor. So you could accidentally leak your IP a second time while trying to get it hidden. Fun!