On 13/07/06, Sean Whitton sean@silentflame.com wrote:
I would disagree with the idea of restricting it to rolling back anons only, as I think with a requirement of that many edits this wouldn't be an issue. Your ideas of using the 3RR rule to autoremove the rollback is a good idea, though.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood, but I would disagree with automatically enabling this ability and instead would suggest that users who are into vandal fighting request it in a similar manner to bot requests.
As I see it, we've got a few options...
1. Just give it out, to all autoconfirmed users. 2. Give it out to all autoconfirmed users who have passed some additional threshold, such as edit count; record user edit counts somewhere, or maintain a flag on their account which is updated when the desired threshold is passed. 3. Have bureaucrats and stewards give it out.
Each option has benefits and each has disadvantages. For instance, suggesting #1 on wikien-l would be liable to get me shot, owing to En Wikipedia's lack of desire to use simple functions such as block against users who deserve it. Abuse it? Blocked. Simple.
Reliance on either of #2 or #3 alone isn't quite optimum in my book. What we *could* do is combine the two. If the implementation for #2 added users to a group with the rollback permission (granted one-off on their 2000th edit, to take an arbitrary figure), as opposed to adding them to an implicit group (effectively re-granted with every session), then it could be revoked for the short or long term by bureaucrats and stewards and ArbCom, oh my.
Retaining option #3 would allow it to be given back, or given out prematurely.
#2 as an implicit group is not too horrendous to code into MediaWiki; we can add a new column to the user table and add checking code to the edit form or Article::editUpdates() method, etc. The more complex proposal starts to look uglier, so I'm thinking implementation of that *might* be via an extension, assuming we have or could add all the required hooks and grappling ledges.
Rob Church