Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Vote for undo action

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Vote for undo action

NoN Proposes a policy change rather than a technical feature

  • Problem: Someone disagrees, and something is done that leads to an unpopular or outright faulty action. Most users have been there. And often (but not always) one part is an admin. The war-like situation is not easy to resolve for anyone, and we need some kind of tool that is reasonably fast and efficient. We need an easy way to vote for an undo action.
  • Who would benefit: Users in general could request a vote over an undo action, but it would be a help for admins in particular as it takes a problem (the do-action) and force it into another process (the undo-action).
  • Proposed solution: Assume something is done, like an edit war, and an admin tries to resolve the problem. To do so one of the users are blocked, and unfortunately the wrong user in one or another perspective. The admin disagree and the whole thing starts to turn into a rage war. That is not good at all, for any of the parties. Now assume the blocked user can still request a vote over the do-action (the blocking) in effect requesting a vote over a proposed undo-action. This vote request can be logged and shown as outstanding at some central page (like the signpost). It is open for 24 hours, and if the outcome is accepted then it is automatically done. If it is rejected it simply goes away by itself. The default action would be to reject, and votes would be given weights according to the users groups. Voting would be anonymous, but you would see your previous cast vote. Involved users (their IP) would be blocked from voting.
  • More comments:
    • Bureaucrats should be able to close a vote process unless they are involved in the action somehow.
    • The vote process should only be started by autoconfirmed users, possibly also only involved users, or bureaucrats.
    • It is not easy to implement simple undo-actions for all possible do-actions.
    • Involved users could be collected from page revision history, etc.
    • Starting the vote-process can also be used as an implicit request to hold the do-action for the duration of the process, ie giving a cool off for 24 hours.
    • It is important that the vote-process use a drop-through model, where no votes imply a reject.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion

Sorry, I'm archiving this proposal because our survey is the wrong venue to propose policy changes and we're not going to work on technical measures that don't already have policy support on the wikis. Thanks for participating in our survey. MaxSem (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Again, I have described a special page that a project may choose to use, I'm not even sure how it is possible to read it any other way? Using a tool like the special page could imply a policy change within a project, creating a tool does not. — Jeblad 23:29, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]