Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 8/23/06, Prasad J prasad59@gmail.com wrote:
How would you distinguish honest errors from malicious vandalism, especially with reagrd to something like dates? I could edit an article to reflect that World War 2 ended in 1935, without intending to do so because of a typographical error? Unless the edit is obvious vandalism, (like saying World War 2 ended in 2045-which cannot, reasonably, be termed a typograhical error), it would be difficult to seperate the vandals from those who make such errors while typing or as a result of looking up the date from a source that is not correct.
Do we need to?
A huge amount of vandalism on wikipedia is a result of "can I really edit this?" as evidenced by the high levels of self revert. Because of this, it is sound policy to warn on the first incident rather than block. Unfortunately we don't have a good way of closely monitoring the contribs of a warned user, but thats another matter.
In any case, our primary concern on this matter is to be accurate... it doesn't matter if the error was induced through an honest mistake, idle curiosity, or malicious intent. We still must detect and resolve it.
Unless there is an evident pattern in the editor's behaviour, the only way to resolve the problem is to fix the error, and go on with life. Warning a person for making an obvious typo, and blocking him if he makes a second typo strikes me as an extremist attitude.
Ec