User:Bovlb

I've been watching some of the cases on RfC and RfAr (and, to a lesser extent, VfD). The thing that leaps out at me is that these pages seem to be taken as general exceptions (and possibly reversals) of the usual rules of no personal attacks and assume good faith. People suddenly feel free to provide negative characterizations of each others' behaviour. I can see the argument that this is necessary for these pages to operate, and I guess I can see the argument that people need some outlet for this sort of thing, but I'm left with a sense of disquiet.

Typically, the bad feelings, flipping the bozo bit, and slanging matches will gradually escalate on article talk pages, and boil over into RfC's and RfAr's. However, unless they end up with one party disappearing (say by being banned), then the disfunctional editor relationships remain, possibly worse than before.

No, I don't have a magic answer.

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Improving History and Fighting Vandalism

A couple of thoughts about what might make the various types of history page better, and help in fighting vandalism:

Put the before and after sizes (in bytes) on pages. Page blanks and radical deletions are easily spotted (but can be easily gamed).
At save time, scan previous entries to determine if the new version is identical to a previous one, and indicate the latest such previous version.
Somehow(!), on a user's contributions, indicate whether they have been reverted. This is either some function of the previous point, or involved recognizing revert actions as special.

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