Last modified: 2014-11-03 08:41:31 UTC
It would be nice if an (sitewide) option could be set in MediaWiki that would reject attempts to carry out non-editing actions such as block, delete, protect and move without filling in the "comment" field, instead returning an error message with a friendly reminder that not filling this in is a PITA for the rest of us mere mortals. Too often I've seen an innocuous-looking page title which on attempted creation presents the message "The page title you have tried to create has been protected from creation. The reason given is."; too often I've seen pages deleted with no explanation provided and have to find and ask someeone to send me the deleted text just so that I can see why it was deleted. Similar problems exist for other actions. Asking nicely unfortunately doesn't seem to work.
If anybody wants to work on this, the existing logic in Core is around here: ./includes/EditPage.php: $status->fatal( 'missingcommenttext' );