[Wikipedia-l] Rollbacks: SoftSecurity on Steroids

[Daniel Mayer]

On Wednesday 04 December 2002 03:38 pm, wikitech-l-request at wikipedia.org 
wrote:
> Despite all the critics, at least for our first vandal bot on the German
> pedia the rollback function came just handy and worked fine. Thanks Brion.
>
> Sven (Ben-Zin)

Mega Dittos! I love this feature because it offers an easy way to wear-down 
vandals without having to block the vandal's IP. Rolling back each edit a 
vandal makes two seconds after they make it should cause most vandals to lose 
interest and leave for good instead of instantly getting pissed-off by 
getting blocked (therefore evoking the "I'll show you" response whose only 
outlet would be circumventing the block or jumping wikis). Thus a string of 
rollbacks would tend to reduce the chance that the vandal will come back 
later with bigger guns (or trash a sleeping non-English wiki). 

For example; as soon as I determine that an IP is a vandal, I leave that IP's 
user contribs page open and periodically hit reload. And WAMMO! I click on 
the rollback link each time the vandal makes an edit. So far every vandal has 
gotten the hint after less than 10 rollbacks. 

It would be nice, however, if clicking on rollback takes you back to the user 
contribs page and not the reverted article. But I understand that there still 
in the problem of possible rollback conflicts where two Admins hit rollback 
in succession and Admin 2 reinstates the vandal version that Admin 1 already 
reverted. So until that can be fixed I don't mind hitting the back button.

When it does get fixed I would like to propose that a limited rollback feature 
be added as a logged-in user default. The limited part would be this; Regular 
logged-in users would not be able to rollback edits made by other logged-in 
users. But IPs would be fair game. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Payment for this post:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Ruthenium&diff=463516&oldid=461717

PS IMO there already are way too many features available to the greenest of 
newbies. It would be nice if we started off new accounts with basic features 
and automatically added more features based on the number of edits that user 
has made and the age of the user account (maybe have three feature-set 
levels: novice, intermediate and old hand). I fear that having too many 
features is intimidating to many non-technical new users. I'm also a wee bit 
apprehensive that new users would abuse features we might otherwise want to 
give to many users (such as the limited rollback feature described above). 

However, after the Lir fiasco I'm no longer in favor of automatically granting 
pure meta-level powers to users. Old hands can and should continue to ask and 
be invited to ask about being Admins.