The closest thing I can think of would be pending changes protection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#Pe...) which is not very frequently applied, but plausible for lightly edited articles. Creation of new articles has been restricted to accounts that have made a small number of edits since about 2011.

After they deleted the article several times (it was blocked from creation, but I used different spellings), I started adding mentions of him in random other ones, which iirc were the edits they started making visible only to me. My "sources" were his personal website hosted on my PC. Yes I was a twerp.

It's also possible I misunderstood and was only seeing the removed edits because of HTTP caching, but I did know about that at the time...