Help:How to show/hide a revision

Occasionally you will need use the show/hide feature on an edit. This should be avoided, but in certain circumstances it is necessary.

The procedure

Get on top of it early

Ideally the next edit following the one that needs to be hidden should be a rollback.

Typical obscene edit that has been reverted.

If this is not possible, remove the offending material from the page and hide every revision from the edit that needs hiding up to, but not including, the reverting revision.

Hiding the edit

The next thing you will need to do is hide the edit and any subsequent edits up to your edit removing the offending material.

Open the history window and next to every edit you will see a button that says (show/hide):

The edit log showing the reverted comment.

This will bring up the delete/undelete revision special page:

The special page.

There are four options:

• Hide revision text: This is typically the one that you will need the most. This hides the page text of that revision from all non sysops /mods/techs. Remember the whole page is saved in full with each revision, so if the text appears on multiple page histories you will need to do this for each revision.
• Hide edit comment: This will only need to be done once if at all. This hides just the text in the edit summary form appearing on the history page. This may be need if someone decides to leave a message in the edit summary that requires removal.
• Hide editor's username/IP: Again one that will be rarely needed. This will hide the user name or IP address of the person who made the edit. You will only need this if the username contains the offensive information.
• Apply these restrictions to administrators and lock this interface: (Moderators only) If an edit needs hiding it will possibly require this as well. This will make the hidden revision only visible to the mods. Given RationalWiki's relaxed standards for sysopship, you might need to hide the edit from them as well, otherwise there is no point in hiding an edit. If a non-moderator has done the hiding of a revision a mod will have to come along and check this box.

To undo any of these, go to the revision history, open the delete/undelete revision special page again and uncheck the boxes.

Result

If you were successful non-administrators will see this in the history:

Moderators should see a typical revision diff with the revision name struck-out, but otherwise readable.