jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I'm a little surprised by this thread. Unless I am not understanding what I am reading, there seems to be actual resistance to the idea that one should read what they are reverting back to. When one reverts, one becomes the latest author/publisher of that article; I suggest that there should be some sense of responsibility for its content.
I'd just encourage all of us not to make edits that can result in introducing, or, yes, re-introducing, defamation, nonsense or vandalism into Wikipedia articles. If you really cannot afford the time to read your edit, it probably is better to not make that edit. As Greg Maxwell is pointing out, the bots do at least leave a message on the user's talk page about what to do if they believe that they have been reverted in error.
In all fairness, I believe the issue has to do with edits where no reason whatsoever is given for the blanking. Defamation and vandalism do indeed require action, but not all of it is put into an article in an obvious way. A single defamatory sentence in a long article is not always easy to spot, especially in an unfamilar subject.
Let's assume that in a long biographical article about a math professor there is the sentence: "Shortly after his divorce in 1988, he left Princeton and was made a full professor at Yale." The entire article is essentially correct, and there is no shortage of references for his mathematical theories and most other aspects of his life. The _only_ problem is that he was never divorced. He sees our comment and blanks the entire article without explanation. Is it reasonable to expect anyone who restores the article will spot the error about the divorce? How much time would it take?
Ec