On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 1:09 PM, John <phoenixoverride(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Issues arise in the fact that malicious editors can
abuse it after the
initial review has been done. Or you can run into cases where offensive
material is added attacking another editor, so editor B reports the issue
and before anyone has a chance to review it editor A changes it back to
something innocent. (rinse repeat for a while before A finally gets
blocked, but meanwhile B is taking the brunt of abuse until an admin
catches on) and there is no way of proving what an edit was at any given
time.
The biggest thing that you need to realize is that regardless of the intent
of something, it will be abused, how and to what degree can be controlled.
Given that just about everything in mediawiki has a paper trail, (mediawiki
keeps logs for all actions, some are just not visible without specific
rights) introducing a feature that doesnt is not a good idea.
I don't think anyone is unaware of the potential for abuse, but that is not
a strong argument against allowing any form of editing edit summaries. A
simple limit would take care of most forms of abuse - either limit it to
trusted users (e.g. oversight), or permit it only on blank edit summaries
and only by the original user. You can even restrict it to a single change,
and then the use case would be: "Oops, I forgot to include an edit summary,
rather than adding a new revision or leaving it blank I'll just go add it
now."