Last modified: 2012-11-09 15:18:14 UTC
When using the "Undo" tool, users should be able to mark the edit that they are reverting with a "vandalism flag" if they feel that it is appropriate.
They can - that is what the edit summary is for.
I think the point is to have an explicit flag, so that edits that carry it (and the edits they revert) could be filtered out of watchlists/page histories. It would certainly be highly desirable to be able to view histories without seeing all the vandalism noise.
That's exactly the idea, and a well said summation as well. Note that we've been discussing this at the Wikipedia Village Pump thread that is linked to in the URL field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#Pure_vandalism_edits
Having such a flag would be pointless unless it could also be manually added to revisions, as otherwise one would be forced to use Undo all the time when rollback or manually saving an old revision would be much more efficient.
(In reply to comment #4) > Having such a flag would be pointless unless it could also be manually added to > revisions, as otherwise one would be forced to use Undo all the time when > rollback or manually saving an old revision would be much more efficient. > Cf bug 1189 for manual tagging of revisions.
Interestingly enough, I was thinking along the exact same lines as Gurch when I first proposed this. I filed a separate request to enable editing of the edit summaries before realizing that it was essentially a duplicate request to bug 13937. I don't think editable flags (this and minor edit) and edit summaries is necessarily a prerequisite to implementing this flag, but both ideas do naturally go hand in hand, and I believe that both would be worthwhile additions. I know that the "oops factor" in relation to edit summaries and use of the minor edit flag has aggravated the heck out of me many times, and is likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This change specifically would certainly be useful in reducing the signal to noise ratio on many history pages at en.wikipedia at least, and should be equally useful everywhere else. The two changes together, while individually relatively minor changes, would be a powerful tool for us to use in my opinion. As with anything there are caveats to be careful of, of course. I simply believe that the benefits far outweigh the potential problems (and I firmly believe that the main criticism, that the flag would be abused to harass others, is very much overblown. Trolls look for highly visible and easily accessible targets, both of which are characteristics that this feature lacks. You have to look at the history to even see the flags (minor, bot, etc...), and with the addition of making them editable any potential disagreements on what is or is not considered to be vandalism would quickly work itself out.
(In reply to comment #2) > I think the point is to have an explicit flag, so that edits that carry it (and > the edits they revert) could be filtered out of watchlists/page histories. It > would certainly be highly desirable to be able to view histories without seeing > all the vandalism noise. With regard to recentchanges/watchlist, the relevant feature is patrolled edits. Edits are automatically patrolled by rollback and can be manually patrolled after undo or manual revert (see also bug 14439 - Undo should auto-patrol reverted revisions, like a rollback does). The remaining proposal is a duplicate of bug 4288, I suppose.
