On 10/6/05, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:
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Stan Shebs wrote:
- We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors
from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies, randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.
I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki, and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that is not at all a pleasure to read.
If you're going to be that brusque, you should accompany your reversion with a comment on a talk page (article or editor) to tell them where you see the problem with their edits. "rv: not an improvement, see [[article:talk]]" is much better. This way, it's constructive rather than just blunt.
-- Michael Turley User:Unfocused