Problem case:

Right now in documentation, it takes one user to approve an edit. This is subject to change, but in general, not many users will be necessary for this.

How the distribution of ownership on documentation currently works opens up a horrible door for abuse.

Say, someone proposes an edit that makes an example into utter garbage (changing many lines) and somehow get it approved (maybe people were robo-reviewing or their friends approved it).

Now, regardless of if we correct this through subsequent edits, that user will recieve rep from that post forever. That means that malicious actors currently have a way to tap into the rep-stream of any popular post, through destructive edits, and save alerting a CM there is no way to put a stop to it.


Add a way to request to "rollback" an edit with prejudice. Have multiple people confirm the edit was deliberately destructive or garbage. In that case, remove all reputation the editor received from the post, and apply an administrative penalty to them. (Maybe -10 rep or -20 even).

Furthermore, have people that approved many such edits be reviewed by moderators and potentially issued a review ban.

| |
  • 12
    I don't think that negative rep resulting from an edit rollback would fly. It doesn't seem to be the direction this thing is taking. Something more palatable might be to only give rep for upvotes on an example to users that have at least 200 characters remaining from their edit in the example at the time of the upvote. That would at least make is so that a bad edit would net +2, but nothing more in the long run. – Daniel Nugent Jul 25 '16 at 9:49
  • 3
    @DanielNugent Not any rollback. Just posts rolled back as obviously garbage and deliberately destructive. We're talking about malicious actors here, not normal people making a maybe-not-so-great edit. – Magisch Jul 25 '16 at 9:50
  • We could make this a rollback with auto-modflag for author and reviewer(s) too. That'd leave less room for abuse of the rep penalty. A ban is anyway punishment enough... – bwoebi Jul 25 '16 at 9:53
  • 4
    How do you handle the rollback if the page has changed considerably? We could potentially lose good content added in the meantime. This should be time restricted. – Knu Jul 25 '16 at 9:54
  • 3
    I definitely think there should be a way to penalize individual authors for posting bad content in Docs... I just can't think of a good solution of how this would be implemented...... – Daniel Nugent Jul 25 '16 at 9:55
  • @Knu I have a feature request for that: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/329310/… – bwoebi Jul 25 '16 at 9:55
  • 35
    So, I ($A) and my split personality ($B) could edit a documention: $A inserts non-sense, $B approves, $B removes non-sense again, $A approves, and it will look like nothing ever happened, and my personalities both get rep forever?! – kay - SE is evil Jul 25 '16 at 11:33
  • 5
    @Kay As it currently is, yes. – Magisch Jul 25 '16 at 11:43
  • 1
    What exactly is this use of the word prejudice here? Suppose there's a mechanism for removing offensive/spam edits in place. If there's no such mechanism, then WTF. – nperson325681 Jul 25 '16 at 12:08
  • @progo "with prejudice" in this context means that its for very bad cases. Like spam, or vandalism, or complete trash to cheat rep. There currently isn't a way of dealing with these save manual rollbacks – Magisch Jul 25 '16 at 12:10
  • @Magisch: okay. I immediately thought of content that is non-PC or mildly non-PC; offensive to some and inoffensive to others. – nperson325681 Jul 25 '16 at 12:12
  • 15
    @progo "With Prejudice" is also a legal term. In the US at least, if a case is dismissed with prejudice, it means the case was without merit and should not be brought again. – Machavity Jul 25 '16 at 12:29
  • I don't think it needs to be a normal part of the editing/review process, but if someone is being deliberately destructive then they can and should be flagged and have a moderator warn them or restrict their account – Hack-R Jul 25 '16 at 12:30
  • 2
    @Hack-R that assumes they get noticed. The whole thing could be done in a few minutes and never realized unless someone goes through opening all edit history which right now is a tedious process – charlietfl Jul 25 '16 at 12:34
  • @Machavity: didn't know that. Cool cool cool. – nperson325681 Jul 25 '16 at 14:51

As of the Reputation overhaul, rolling back an edit removes the contributor status the user gained from the proposed change. I don't think further punishment is a good idea. Or rather, there are a bunch of other sanctions I'd rather try first.

| |
  • There are some other good ideas brought up here. What about removing the automatic approval mechanism for trusted users who repeatedly make edits which need to be reversed? Or limiting the number of edits a user can propose based on the percentage of their edits that have been rolled back? – user4639281 Dec 10 '16 at 0:45

I don't know that there needs to be a negative rep associated (that could be a trolling mechanism) but I think we need two distinct mechanisms here

  1. Some sort of penalty on the privilege of editing Docs. Too many rejections leads to some sort of temp ban. I don't know what mods can do in this area already, but if you get too many rejects in other edit queues (or failed audits) you can't make any more mistakes for a while.
  2. Removing the rep flow from bad edits
| |
  • 2
    I suggest adding early warnings about possible edit bans, so users could improve and the site not lose a potentially valuable but misguided contributor. Perhaps a yellow notification message "Out of 10 of your latest suggested edits 4 were rejected. Try making better edits or making edits in other tags/topics to avoid possible edit restrictions." – user1306322 Jul 26 '16 at 16:09

The solution is to stop awarding rep points for edits that require approval.

Users with privileges for making direct edits without approval do not get rep for their edits; why should approved edits get rep?

(Of course, the answer is: to encourage the large base of users without edit privileges to suggest edits.)

Definitely, though, if, say, version 7 is rolled back to version 3, then the software should determine all of the edit points that were awarded for versions 4, 5, 6 and 7, and take them away from their respective editors.

An nearly ideal system would work like this:

  • no points are awarded simply for having an edit approved, or otherwise making an edit.

  • when an up-vote or down-vote is made, this is deemed to be against the current version of the text. If a new version of the text is made later, the old votes continue to pertain to the specific version against which they were made.

  • for each version of the text, the majority author is determined (for instance by a similar algorithm to git blame, or something with a finer granularity than line based). The reputation of that majority author is affected by the votes against that version.

  • voting on previous versions should be possible. If I think that version 3 of an answer was useful, but the current version, 5, isn't, I should be able to up-vote version 3, and the majority author of that version should get the rep boost.

| |
  • 9
    I dislike the the whole rep-blame system. It encourages those focused on rep to touch all the text instead of making smaller edits. It simultaneously removes any incentive to make minor improvements to an existing post. People will gum up the works with new Examples instead of editing existing. – Machavity Jul 25 '16 at 21:56

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .