https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23087
--- Comment #7 from Gurch <[email protected]> 2010-04-14 13:26:16 UTC --- (In reply to comment #6) > Wanting to filter rollback actions is not an illegitimate aim. I'm not sure I agree with that. In theory maybe, on wikis with rollback assigned to *, user or autoconfirmed maybe, but on Wikimedia wikis at least, it's as dubious as wanting to filter block, delete or protect actions. They're all actions limited to privileged groups which carry some implicit level of trust, where abuse is better dealt with by removal from said groups than by some sort of automated filtering tool. Especially one where anyone with a sysop bit can wander in and impose their own iffy understanding of regular expressions on everyone else's contributions. In this instance the stated use case is even worse. de.wikipedia has a policy against edit warring, which for reasons that escape me is enforced by an abuse filter. Contributors presumably trusted enough to be assigned to the privileged group which includes rollback are using that to circumvent the filter and continue edit warring, and (again for reasons that escape me) simply blocking offenders or removing them from their privileged group doesn't seem to happen. Edit warring is a social problem and should be addressed as such, not with technical kludges. My personal recommendation to any de.wikipedia contributors who feel edit warring is too much of a problem would be to propose and work towards something analogous to en.wikipedia's three-revert rule. And tell their administrators to actually enforce their policies rather than labouring under the false assumption that a computer program can do it for you with a zero error rate. Just as importantly, rollback is needed to deal with broken and/or excessive filters that start enforcing the presence of vandalism. Remember that the abuse filter suffers from the same design flaw as the external link blacklist -- a change to a filter can render previously fine pages uneditable because existing content on the page matches it. With the closed-source filter system, users affected in this way can't see what is causing the problem, and of course the filters always exempt administrators so nobody who can change the filters sees that the problem is there. As a result, it can take days for such broken filters to be dealt with. During that time, all it takes is for a vandal to erase / screw up / type gibberish over the legitimate content the filter was matching, and now you have a page that is stuck in a vandalised state, and cannot be reverted to its previous state (except by an almighty administrator, of course) because the filter will block the edit. Always allowing rollback to succeed guards against this -- not perfectly, because a vandal knowledgeable of the situation can simply make multiple edits with different accounts, but sufficient for most cases. If you agreed to modify the filter system so that the only user group checks permitted were for "user" and "autoconfirmed", so that administrators had to suffer with the rest of us when they screwed up filters, then maybe we could talk. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
