On 10/19/06, Matt R matt_crypto@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I, for one, am not about to start reading entire articles to check for problems every time I encounter one of them being blanked by a new user with no explanation. Sure, as a human I can grok the context better than a bot, but I'm not going to waste more than half a minute on it.
Then you have no business reverting blanked articles... if you are going to do a worse job than the bots, then you should leave it to them.
Sure, there might be a tiny chance that the person had spotted a problem and was making a good faith effort to flag that -- but they'll find a way to send the message another way. Honestly, they will. It's not just editors who have the grey white mush between their ears, right?
And they did, obviously, because if they hadn't the junk would have stayed up. But that doesn't fix the loss of goodwill that we suffer because of this.
This is a trade-off between the convenience of outsiders versus the convenience of experienced editors. My view is that in this particular type of situation, the inconvenience of experienced editors very much outweighs the inconvenience of an outsider. Most of the time, we should (and do) bend over backwards to help newcomers at our own cost, but there's a limit.
It would be a lot easier if the expirenced editor, in this case, did nothing at all.
Either a bot which can be trained make better decisions than a person who doesn't read, or a person who did read, would have done a better job.