>From Gregory Maxwell in the "[Wikitech-l] User block changes" thread:
> If someone can't cooperate they are lost to us and we should just
> block, if they can then there is no need for fancy technical
> measures.
I agree. OT (hence the subject name change), but related to this
general principle of just getting out of the way of people that are
fundamentally sensible:
Something that seems a bit strange to me is rollback. The current
situation I believe is that "Admins have a handy 'rollback' feature
which allows them to instant-revert changes from a user's
contributions page".
Sounds great, useful, and sensible. Everything apart from the "admins
only bit". Why stop at admins? Me personally, I'm not a wikipedia
admin (and currently the idea of yet another system that I'm an admin
of in some way holds zero appeal), but the ability to quickly undo
vandalism is useful, and could be given to far more users and be a big
net win for vandalism control. The whole "history -> click on last
edit minus one -> click edit -> type out 'revert' -> click save" cycle
gets very tedious and repetitive after a while.
<rant>
Why do we do this? Yes, there probably has to be some point at which
we start trusting people enough to do easy rollbacks, but "admin" is
too high a standard. If someone has a login, and has (say) >= 1000
edits, and has used the system for (say) >= 3 months, there's a pretty
good chance they can spot an anon committing vandalism on pages on
their watchlist. So why don't we make undoing this easier? Why don't
we help such people more, empower them more, and make what they can
already do just that bit easier and quicker? And I don't just mean me,
or just this specific user and that specific user, I mean all users
who cross a certain measurable threshold of trustworthiness and
commitment, should automatically be given rollback ability. Maybe
start the entry criteria high so that only a few people qualify
initially, and then gradually lower them whilst the gain from lowering
exceeds the pain from misuse - that would be fine, as long as it's a
systematic attempt to empower a whole category of trusted users, as
opposed to a user-by-user non-systematic approach.
</rant>
All the best,
Nick.