[WikiEN-l] Before reverting blanking, please read the text

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Matt R wrote:
> --- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Matt R wrote:
>>> --- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> And the other /other/ take-home message is that if you're going to
>>>> revert someone, and they revert back, discuss it with them! I'm sick and
>>>> tired of finding user accounts with many many contributions which were
>>>> all reverted as "vandalism", and yet there is nothing on their talk page.
>>> Discussing is good practice in most situations, but I think in this type of
>>> instance the onus is on the blanker to provide some reason. If a new user
>>> blanks an article without explanation, the odds are overwhelming that it's
>>> vandalism (or a test, or whatever). Just revert; it's simply not worth the
>> time
>>> to drop a note with such odds. Moreover, it's very likely is that someone
>> with
>>> a genuine reason to blank the article will communicate his reason very
>> shortly
>>> thereafter (did that happen in this case?)
>>>
>> If by "send a private email to the contact address of last resort" you
>> mean "communicate their reason", well, yeah. Not the most effective
>> method, though; it would have been far better if the person who reverted
>> had left a simple {{blanking}} on their talk page:
> 
> Even better, of course, would have been for the person to have used (say) the
> edit summary box to give some indication of why they were blanking an
> encyclopedia article. I really do feel that the onus is on them to give some
> reason for their drastic action, which is otherwise indistinguishable from
> hundreds of similar acts of vandalism a day.
> 

Perhaps we need to enable one of the JavaScript "Warn if no edit
summary" things (I wrote a great one which can nag you up to 3 times)
for anons... something like "As an anonymous user, you are required to
provide a reason for your changes. Please enter it in the text box
below:"...

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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