On Nov 6, 2007 8:35 PM, Delirium <delirium(a)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