On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 1:09 PM, John phoenixoverride@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."