Tim Starling wrote: >I used to just revert them automatically when such changes appeared on >my watchlist. If someone changes the population of Denmark or the >formation enthalpy of carbon tetrachloride, without providing any >reference or any suggestion that it is a revert, the chances that the new >information is more accurate than the old information is extremely low.
I don't follow this logic at all. It seems to be the exact opposite of "assume good faith." And obviously statistics such as the population of Denmark are mutable. If someone were changing, for example, a chemical element's properties, there might be more reasonable concern or suspicion, but even then it'd be pretty dickish to simply revert on sight. Much of the content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis comes from non-vested contributors. That is, many, many helpful additions and corrections come from people who will make only a few edits in their lifetime. While I can't disagree with the suggestion that reverting is easier than fact-checking, I very much doubt that assuming bad faith helps build a better project or a better community. And this is to say nothing of the fact that the seemingly simple act of providing a reference is often painful and unintuitive, particularly in established articles that employ complicated markup (infoboxes, citation templates, and ref tags). MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
