Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-70.72.211.35-20130120171335/@comment-188432-20130121024801

Hard to take your complaint seriously, 70.72, when you didn't give any edit summaries, either — at least not until you reverted MM and said, ironically, "no reason given". And you're being less than generous to Mini-mitch, who did ultimately give a very full edit summary.

I must also note that what you are requesting is technically impossible. As far as I'm aware, the very most that we could do is to make a little warning come up, asking people to confirm that they don't want leave an edit summary. But it's still possible to avoid leaving an edit summary. And this would work only if the editor were making a regular edit. As Shambala108 has correctly noted, when using the rollback feature — a special tool available to admin — it's in no way possible to leave an edit summary.

I know that it's frustrating to have your work reverted without a clear understanding why. There being so many reasons why a thing might be deleted, you should not assume malicious intent. At worst, you should assume that user:Mini-mitch simply forgot the edit summary. At best, you can assume that he was performing a rollback, and therefore could not enter an edit summary. (And in fact, that's precisely what he was doing at Quick Reads, according to the history.) Either way, it's no biggie.

All this can be doubly frustrating for the IP user, because we admin might summarily revert the work of a vandal using your IP address without realising that you're a different user to the vandal. This is part of the reason that it's vital that you register an account.

You should also realise that we have no way to talk to IP users such that we can be assured that they've got the message. If you register, then we can communicate with you.

The perk of registration is that your work will more likely survive — and, if it doesn't, you'll probably get a message as to why the deletion occurred.

Our long experience on this wiki is that it is a total waste of time for admin to leave messages for IP users. Back in the day, when we were using different skins, it was possible for us to communicate with IP users a bit better. But that's all changed in the last couple of years. The administrative staff are under absolutely no illusions about our ability to communicate with IP users like you. There's not one single avenue of communication that we have with an IP user where we know that you'll get our messages. You don't get a message flag if we change MediaWiki:Community-corner, your user talk page, a forum thread — nothing. You've chosen to edit our wiki from the fringe of our community, and in a way that you are wholly prevented from normal communication. So you really can't expect us to try to communicate.

That may seem harsh, but realistically, the software treats the message alert as a perk of registration. So if you want to be a full part of this community, again, register an account.

Now, having said all that, everyone should realise that it is policy to leave an edit summary. I've recently added some javascript to the edit window which provides you will a drop down menu of edit summaries. It is easier than ever to leave an edit summary. But still, even those of us who are pretty religious about leaving edit summaries are going to miss a mass or three.