[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 00:45:35 UTC 2005

On 10/6/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> >
> > 2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors
> > from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors
> > (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies,
> > randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.
>
> I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that
> doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply
> revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to
> send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a
> plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki,
> and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the
> aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that
> is not at all a pleasure to read.

If you're going to be that brusque, you should accompany your
reversion with a comment on a talk page (article or editor) to tell
them where you see the problem with their edits.  "rv: not an
improvement, see [[article:talk]]" is much better.  This way, it's
constructive rather than just blunt.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused