Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-10473115-20150707192350/@comment-122657-20150803153456

Edkaufman wrote: I would have suggested a closed facebook group, since, well, we don't have an admin-only area on the forums like we had before... and yes, regular users are following the admin forums.

I'm up for a closed FB Group to talk about such things. Let me know if you want me to set it up. Are there any admins who don't use Facebook?

Mrkermit wrote: Reverting can be done with editing and saving an old revision but with using a rollback option it's marked as minor without edit summary. That's why it's meant to be used only as a tool to clean up vandalism. So you're right that if we would give out that user privilege, its purpose should be explained and preferably documented to a help page. I'm starting to think that if someone isn't enthusiastic about introducing Recent changes patrol group, we shouldn't do it. It would need some work anyway.

I'll explain why I don't feel that it's necessary after all. My motivation for proposing this change came purely from the problems with edits of new users. That discussion was moving to a direction where we would start to protect pages from editing for the lack of peer review. Some pages are already protected because that issue is still unsolved. I strongly disagree with that kind of protection and as an option, proposed Recent changes patrol to help with edit reviews. However, after that I'm learnt that there are two related user rights, patrol (to patrol other's edits) and autopatrol (own edits marked as patrolled). If we're going to be very selective with giving rights, it's not the best option to find edits of new users. We have many bot-like editors and it would be lot of work to patrol all those edits. That's why it would be better option to give just autopatrol rights to those users since there absolutely isn't any downside for that. It would just remove the red exclamation mark from their edits and that would help to find edits of new users. Because it would be quite a work for b-crats to promote everyone manually, it's better to create some kind of auto-promoted user class. And if it's technically impossible or the company don't want to create it for us, we should just add autopatrol to Autoconfirmed users group. Maybe even that would be enough to pinpoint edits of new users.

I like the idea of selectively giving out the autopatrol tag to users we trust. It's not that hard to do. If you want to give me a list to start with, I can put them through that way.

I whole-heartedly agree that locking pages down is the wrong direction to go. This is a place where anyone can contribute, even if they do it wrong at first. If we limit how people can do that, we're removing a major piece of the heart of the site (IMHO). I believe Jamie used to feel that once an article became 'complete' there would be a logical stopping point and a good place to lock a page down. I've never felt that way. We are a source of information, and it's critical we try our best to ensure that it is legitimate, but we need good people doing good work to make it happen.