Risker wrote:
Office actions are almost never undertaken by Engineering staff; it's usually Legal & Community Advocacy staff, or rarely another administrative staff member.
How should an Engineering Staff member indicate that he'd like an edit undone and not done again? Through an Office Action? One'd think that an edit summary is the only way. Why is it not being used?
An undo with appropriate edit summary would also avoid a need in escalating the issue - local sysops would consciously hold off their edit. If they went against an office action, introducing superprotect /then/ could make sense (although I would personally iterate through 2 undos with a massive warning in the second one).
Now, in your reply, why do I fail to see a reason why such approach was or is not used? Could you please clarify?
Risker wrote:
What you are talking about is something that has only been done very occasionally over the years by Engineering/Operations staff/sysadmins. There has been no designated manner in which those actions should be flagged.
This doesn't appear to be a problem to me. Sysops surely read edit summaries. (Note how Erik doesn't use a (WMF) account either - he wrote a message and appended 'this is a wmf action' to the end, which /WAS ENOUGH/.
Risker wrote:
One must remember that until the last few years, the majority of individuals who could have taken (and in some cases, did take) such serious action were volunteer sysadmins, so labeling it a "WMF action" would not have been correct.
OK, some context - doesn't really apply to this case. In this case it was not a volunteer sysadmin.
Risker wrote:
We also have to remember that many of the systems that developers and engineers work with on a daily basis do not permit edit summaries, so adding what for many of us is an automatic and routine comment is for some of them a rare and unusual event. (Perhaps they should set their work account preferences to be "reminded" to include an edit summary?)
"Our Eng Staff don't know how to use wiki software" is perhaps a way to tell why they "forgot to do it", but it doesn't mean that doing it wouldn't've been a good idea.
I might perhaps even suggest going and removing superprotect, and actually going and using an edit summary /instead/, now. It's late, but better late then never.
svetlana