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

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/10/06, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Assume good faith is a fine principle, but the suggestion here seems to be that
> editors must engage every such page blanker in dialogue based on the remote
> chance that they just might have a good reason for doing it, even though they
> didn't bother giving it at the time. That just doesn't seem worthwhile to me;
> the effort involved seems disproportionate to any possible harm.

No, the suggestion that kicked this off is that editors should eyeball
the material which was blanked to check that *it itself* isn't
vandalism or other miscellanous undesirableness before automatically
reverting. I've spotted a few cases in the past where someone has
rolled back to vandalism because someone helpfully tried to remove it;
I suspect I may have done it myself.

The issue here isn't that someone blanked their own page and was
reverted without us talking to them. The issue is that someone blanked
their own page *containing blatant crap* and was reverted for it; the
issue is that, to outsiders, this sort of not-quite-paying-attention
error looks and feels like *we're* actively trying to push this stuff
about them.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk