[WikiEN-l] Date vandalism

[Ray Saintonge]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>On 8/23/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>How would you distinguish honest errors from malicious vandalism,
>>especially with reagrd to something like dates? I could edit an
>>article to reflect that World War 2 ended in 1935, without intending
>>to do so because of a typographical error? Unless the edit is obvious
>>vandalism, (like saying World War 2 ended in 2045-which cannot,
>>reasonably, be termed a typograhical error), it would be difficult to
>>seperate the vandals from those who make such errors while typing or
>>as a result of looking up the date from a source that is not correct.
>>    
>>
>Do we need to?
>
>A huge amount of vandalism on wikipedia is a result of "can I really
>edit this?" as evidenced by the high levels of self revert.  Because
>of this, it is sound policy to warn on the first incident rather than
>block.  Unfortunately we don't have a good way of closely monitoring
>the contribs of a warned user, but thats another matter.
>
>In any case, our primary concern on this matter is to be accurate...
>it doesn't matter if the error was induced through an honest mistake,
>idle curiosity, or malicious intent. We still must detect and resolve
>it.
>
Unless there is an evident pattern in the editor's behaviour, the only 
way to resolve the problem is to fix the error, and go on with life.  
Warning a person for making an obvious typo, and blocking him if he 
makes a second typo strikes me as an extremist attitude.

Ec