User:Zenswashbuckler

The removal of vandalism is obviously paramount, a sine-qua-non of an anonymous, open-source encyclopedia that is worth anyone's time to read. It is good that there are tools and bots that have been painstakingly crafted and programmed to give editors an easy time reverting vandalism. Even the regular "undo" button is really indispensable as an alternative to the bare minimum of copy-pasting the previous version. These tools encourage giving a crap, help people not be seduced by saying to themselves, "Boy, that's too complicated for me to deal with right now; I'm just so (tired / at work / pissed off / occupied / lazy / procrastinating / drunk / high / sleepediting) that I can't possibly take the time to rewrite or recopy all that needs rewriting in the face of this asshole's disruptions." (By the way, these aren't criticisms - all are at some point legitimate reasons not to edit at all). Instead, the editor can simply click a button or two, and the offending "contributions" vanish from the page.

It is when the editor unconsciously comes to believe that only a button push is ever needed to revert vandalism that the true problem arises. Anyone seeing a fat slew of profanity in an article can see that something is wrong, and nobody reading a sentence that starts something like "Homebrewing is a pastime of pathetic losers with too much spare time and not enough sexual experience..."HINT: It's not. Homebrewing is awesome. is going to take it at face value. But what happens when vandals spread their manure over several different edits? Often a vandal will just delete something with the first edit, then make the actual vandalism with the next one(s). Most times this turns out OK because the reverting editor rolls back the entire gamut of useless crap - but often the "One button, done!" idea will go to an editor's head and s/he will (quite unconsciously!) ignore all but the last edit, resulting in the gradual chipping-away of content and a similarly slow accumulation of nonsense.

I'm not sure there's a solution; maybe it would help to add disclaimers on the rollback, twinkle, & undo pages asking vandal-crusaders if they've looked to make sure they have looked at all vandalistic edits before proceeding. Maybe that's obnoxious, too. I'm not sure. This is an ongoing problem, though.

= De Meo =

= Miscellany =