Matt R wrote:
--- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Matt R wrote:
--- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" alphasigmax@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:"...