Maybe “attempted” would be more accurate? I personally don’t mind the “bad”, I get what is meant by it.
But since we’re talking about accuracy: I don’t agree on redactions being binary. You can redact with a pen that under certain lighting still reveals the text; you can redact parts that are easy to reconstruct when you have additional information; you can redact with a pen color that over time loses its function; etc. The “perfect” redaction would perhaps leave no clues as to even how much text was redacted? It seems to depend on the goal and context of the redaction, whether it achieves its purpose or not.
I still think that the word redacted is meant to destroy the original text, it might not remove the metadata (e.g. length).
Redaction is done mostly in ways with a possibility to reveal the underlying text, but all this is not redacted in my understanding of the word. I always liked the english word for this – the german word "schwärzen" just means to "blacken" the text and this was never the same for me.
But after further research I must agree with you, it just means to obscure or remove, but not clearly just remove. I have been using it for years in a stronger meaning that it's really meant.
One more but: we hopefully can all agree that putting a black bar over some text which still is just copy/pasteable is not even obscuring.
But since we’re talking about accuracy: I don’t agree on redactions being binary. You can redact with a pen that under certain lighting still reveals the text; you can redact parts that are easy to reconstruct when you have additional information; you can redact with a pen color that over time loses its function; etc. The “perfect” redaction would perhaps leave no clues as to even how much text was redacted? It seems to depend on the goal and context of the redaction, whether it achieves its purpose or not.