On Nov 6, 2007 8:35 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
A lot of problems - certainly back when I was still regularly dealing with OTRS earlier in the year - came from patrollers assuming that an imperfect or confusing contribution was vandalism, was spam, was malicious. They acted accordingly - reverted or deleted and warned - which just confused and upset the subject.
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
In my own patrolling (admittedly infrequent these days since I find writing new articles less annoying), I've gone back to my circa-2003 way of dealing with the problem, before user-warning templates existed: just post a short note on the user's talk page telling them that you undid their edit and why.
For example, if someone removes an entire section with no edit comment, I'll write something like, "Please don't remove sections of articles without discussing on the talk page or at least providing a reason in the edit summary. I've added it back for now. Thanks!". (Credit goes to Brianna Laugher at Wikimania '07 for suggesting that approach.)
I do find a pretty large percentage of things that aren't *obvious* vandalism are good-faith errors, and some of the people who made them even respond with apologies after being "warned". Some amount of judgment is needed of course---if the edit is from an IP address that's been tagged as belong to a library or school computer, I usually don't bother to spend time doing that.
I believe another Mark (User:Fuddlemark?) was an advocate of this brief but untemplated approach for quite some time before he left/went on permanent wikibreak. I usually switch between it and the templates depending on my mood; I've also created my own version of the welcome template with an argument allowing me to add some personal comment (e.g. "Btw, great edits to [[article X]] - keep it up!"). IMO, like all things, templates rely on judicious use by a thinking human. Mechanical reliance on either approach is a recipe for some sort of disaster.
Johnleemk