Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-24947676-20170717230517/@comment-24947676-20170717233145

SirVicksALot wrote: Strongly oppose. Oh me oh my, where does old Vick start?

Firstly, yes, I more than understand edit conflicts can be resolved by copying and pasting, but that doesn't mean that they're still not a huge pain in the ass. And, as someone who typically leaves their pages open in edit mode for quite a while for my own reasons (multitasking, in case I get busy, wanting to get everything in one edit so I don't edit spam, etc), so edit conflicts would be huge pains in the ass.

Secondly, as a person who gets anxiety over people editing my pages, I'd like to respectfully call this reason bullshit. The short answer as to why is that it isn't that hard to ask someone in the comments, on their wall, etc politely to edit their page(s) to fix up any grammar, categories, formatting, etc. Say if a staff member did just that and asked a user on their wall beforehand and told them what they were going to change, and the user could answer no and do it themselves to make it easier on the staff member. So, it wouldn't be "preventing the staff members from doing their job," if anything, it's making the non-staff users wake up and learn how to do things themselves and not have a staff member do it for them since, again, the staff member could just ask them if they can edit their page(s) and what they are going to change politely. I also believe the "angry mob" part to be a major exaggeration; I would just ask whoever to ask for permission before editing my pages again politely and move on, and so should everyone else since that's reasonable, right?

Thirdly and lastly, I do agree that our staff members should be trusted to not abuse their power and make random edits to pages and vandalise them, and if they do so they should be punished (demoted and blocked). So, I do agree with this and don't see the issue in it unless we've all fucked up really badly and promoted some biased, idiot vandal (if that's a word) to be a staff member where they can edit pages without permission. First, as I stated in the essay, edit conflicts aren't the only pain in the ass you might run into when you leave your pages in edit mode for long periods of time - in addition, just publishing your edit every 15-30 minutes not only prevents flooding (as its a decently long period between edits), it also prevents large amounts of information loss. Again, edit mode isn't going to disappear while you're busy.

Second, although I did overexaggerate with the angry mob bit, the fact of the matter is that most wikis don't bother with asking to edit because getting an answer can take a long time (time zones), and if the person answers "nein" then that actively prevents staff from doing their job, as most users that aren't staff are quite lazy. There are exceptions, but this is the majority. Again, the point of this suggestion is to make sure that the staff can do their jobs in a timely manner.