> Deletionists are capricious and arbitrary, reversals are beauracratic, complex and lengthy (if even possible)
The article was clearly talking about repairing bot edits; since bots are almost* universally restricted to editor capabilities, all their actions are undoable. I have myself occasionally reverted bot edits - but very rarely, since generally bots are very good at what they do, and as the article says, they have made a huge difference in vandalism fighting.
(On the other hand, the article omits one of the major instances of bot abuse: the use of scripts/bots by a few editors to ram through removal of all the {{spoiler}} templates despite the absence of consensus to deprecate their use.)
* I remember a few proposals for admin-bots, but I don't remember whether they passed the Bot people or whether they were to do irreversible actions like deletion.
To be clear, in this context, I'm only talking about delete bots who kill new content seconds after it's created. A phenomenon so frustrating and common that there are probably tens of thousands of examples on open forums of this (including HN) and no doubt is a huge part of the massive reduction in new editors and new user engagement at WP (as tracked in several Foundation reports over the years -- but somehow always ignore this issue).
There aren't any bots that auto-delete articles. There are a handful of bots with administrator privileges, but they can only do things that humans have specified, with significant delay. For example, there was one (no longer active) that deleted empty categories that had been flagged by a human for deletion as empty, and not challenged for N days. There was also one (haven't followed up on whether it's still active) that deleted images that were tagged as copyright violations for more than N days.
Comments
> Deletionists are capricious and arbitrary, reversals are beauracratic, complex and lengthy (if even possible)
The article was clearly talking about repairing bot edits; since bots are almost* universally restricted to editor capabilities, all their actions are undoable. I have myself occasionally reverted bot edits - but very rarely, since generally bots are very good at what they do, and as the article says, they have made a huge difference in vandalism fighting.
(On the other hand, the article omits one of the major instances of bot abuse: the use of scripts/bots by a few editors to ram through removal of all the {{spoiler}} templates despite the absence of consensus to deprecate their use.)
* I remember a few proposals for admin-bots, but I don't remember whether they passed the Bot people or whether they were to do irreversible actions like deletion.
To be clear, in this context, I'm only talking about delete bots who kill new content seconds after it's created. A phenomenon so frustrating and common that there are probably tens of thousands of examples on open forums of this (including HN) and no doubt is a huge part of the massive reduction in new editors and new user engagement at WP (as tracked in several Foundation reports over the years -- but somehow always ignore this issue).
There aren't any bots that auto-delete articles. There are a handful of bots with administrator privileges, but they can only do things that humans have specified, with significant delay. For example, there was one (no longer active) that deleted empty categories that had been flagged by a human for deletion as empty, and not challenged for N days. There was also one (haven't followed up on whether it's still active) that deleted images that were tagged as copyright violations for more than N days.
They appear to be doing a marvelous job of failing the turing test then.