[WikiEN-l] So, has the need for consensus in wikipedia been eliminated?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 10, 2008 11:19 AM, Majorly <axel9891 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> You are over-exaggerating my comments.

Huh?

> Do you really expect a four day old
> account to know how to use rollback appropriately? I certainly don't, and I
> think having a scarred block log for messing up with a rather powerful tool
> that until the other day only admins could have is a little unfair to the
> user.

Well... four days is plenty of time to read the instructions. But,
no.. I don't expect them to know.

I also don't expect them to know how to follow Wikipedia's copyright
policy (and based on behavior, they clearly don't) nor do I expect
them to understand the myriad of requirements in the manual of style,
the external linking policy, or a zillion other rules ...

It would be nice if they understood Neutral Point of View, but most
newbies certainly do not appear to do so...

And page moves,  ... page naming is some of the most complex, poorly
documented, and long-term controversial of all the issues on
Wikipedia. (Why is the article called German and not Deutschland? Côte
d'Ivoire and not the Ivory Coast?). It would be a rare newbie indeed
who understood that stuff.

The vulgarities of template syntax?  I'd guess that most *admins*
don't understand more than the most basic aspects of that.

... and it doesn't stop there.

> If we followed his idea where everyone got rollback, that would be the
> situation. I didn't say that they couldn't edit, nor did his idea say that
> they could. This is about *rollback*, not general right to edit. And undo is
> not rollback.

In the context of a typical four day old user what is the difference
in the disruptive potential between undo and rollback?  I agree that
rollback is more useful for high speed vandalism, but thats not the
kind of disruption that comes from simple newbie ignorance.