[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia approaches its limits" - Technology Guardian

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Bod Notbod<bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Ian Woollard<ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> One of my pet hates: when an IP changes a figure in in infobox or
>>> somewhere in article, with no comment, and no source. I've heard
>>> reports of people doing this as sport, just to be annoying, but in my
>>> experience, they're often right. But it leaves you in a real quandary,
>>> if you can't verify it either way.
>>
>> I normally revert those, unless you can verify it it's just an
>> unreferenced change. You can leave a message on their talk page though
>> asking for a ref. Same goes for logged-ins.
>
> I see a lot of these patrolling recent changes in Huggle. I look at
> the user's other contribs and provided I can find just one in the same
> day where he's blanked the page and written "SUCK MY ASS!!!" I'll
> revert the numeric change and put "rv numerical change by bad faith
> editor but editors may wish to double-check" as an edit summary.

What you need to check here is that the editor in question isn't
reverting vandalism by someone else. In other words, you need to check
back further through the edit history to make sure you are reverting
to the last clean version. I've seen cases of HUGGLE and TWINKLE users
reverting a vandalised page to a still-vandalised state, and no-one
else checking, and such vandalised pages (now with the "legitimacy" of
a revert from an "approved" user) staying in that state for months.

> Another warning sign is a number of numeric changes, without any other
> sort of edit, in completely unrelated types of articles. I wouldn't
> necessarily rv on that basis but I probably would if they've had any
> sort of warning that day.

Same comment as above. Reverting should never be done without checking
what you are reverting TO.

Carcharoth