On Sun, 24 Aug 2014, at 07:02, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 10:53 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
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
Note that's exactly what was tried in the dewiki situation. The first WMF revert[1] refers to a warning on the talk page[2] that (according to Google Translate, and Erik's later statements) seems to basically say "Please don't do this again. Otherwise we might have to remove the editability of this page."
But the local sysop didn't hold off; according to Google Translate he replied "With threats you will achieve nothing."
-- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation
By the way, while there is a downside to what the folks did (as in, edit war and insist on stuff), I suppose it's partly justified by the thing being a first point in time where a local consencus was considered insufficient.
I took some notes of this, and possible solutions, on this draft essay: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Regaining_trust_in_local_consencus
I expect that superprotect is just a consequence of such missing trust; once the trust is regained, there is no need in superprotect in principle.
svetlana