[WikiEN-l] Before reverting blanking, please read the text

[Matt R]

--- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/19/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/19/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> 
> But it is ABSOLUTELY INEXCUSABLE for a human to act in a manner which
> is no more intelligent than a bot. If you are not going to read when
> you revert a blanking, you should leave the work to a bot which will
> generally do a better, faster, and more consistent job than you ... a
> human who is pretending to be a bot.

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. 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?

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.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

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