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.