[WikiEN-l] Before reverting blanking, please read the text

Fri Oct 20 05:55:16 UTC 2006

On 10/19/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> You contradict yourself. If you leave it to the bot, you are assuming
> it is more intelligent than you are, or, you are just ignoring a
> problem.

No, I don't. It' is apparent that some people are not reading before
they revert, and there are folks in this thread advocating that doing
so is okay.

My position is that if you aren't going to read it, you shouldn't
revert it... leave it to a bot which will (eventually) do a better job
than a human who reverted blindly.

> Why leave something for a bot, that you could have done on
> sight.

I'd rather a human make a decision, but if they aren't going to a
decision and instead act like a bot... then we should allow the bot to
do the work, it will do a better job and its mistakes will be both
more excusable and easier to fix.

> The edit in the first post was a short edit. Do you really
> really expect everyone to, 1) wait for a bot, which may or may not
> come, or 2) to read the entirety of every edit which can be
> comfortably, with a large margin, to be considered vandalism.

Or more accurately, I want people who are not going to read to refrain
from vandalism reversion...  leave it to the bots and reading humans.

> Bots are
> not more consistent with their intelligence, they are just plain dumb.
> Consistency in your context does not mean the intelligent consistency.

A human who reverts a blanked page because it was blanked without
reading anything is never superior to a bot. At its very worst a bot
would be equal, but when a bot reverted blanking inappropriately we
could add rules to avoid some cases... not true with a human who
doesn't read.