Wikipedia talk:Revert only when necessary

message: I want to nominate this essay as a guideline. Who's with me? —Wei4Green | 唯绿远大 (talk) 05:36, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I am.  The basic message of this essay is more deserving of being a guideline than any I've seen in a long time.  Some material might need to be excluded because is written more like persuasion and explanation than guidance.  Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 00:12, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

text: Not me. And that's for the same reasons that I and others rejected the proposal to elevate WP:BRD to a guideline. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 04:47, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

text: I support this. I find the undo function necesssary but very problematic as it diminishes tools like  and most of all the most basic and most accessable Wikipedia tool the talk page. It destroys discussion outside of the established users. It makes possible content often invisible. Reasons for undoing are too often problems with language or form, and not because of unresolveable issues. Nsae Comp (talk) 07:59, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

text: I would support it too. Too often, the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater from a good faith edit. Inevitably there would have be some changes to fit it into the guideline format. Anywikiuser (talk) 12:09, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

text: Nah. Honestly much of this essay strikes me as naive. Edits that may be good faith, yet misguided and unsalvageable, are very common. We don't do such people a favor by keeping poor additions, and certainly not our readers. And what's also common is people coming on here to promote personal or fringe ideas. We should not try to keep some of such content and create a WP:FALSEBALANCE. Also, changes are scrutinized the most when they've just been done. Better to uproot poor content while it's new and we're examining it than let it sit around misleading people for possibly many years. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:26, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

text: Sure, though it'll need some rewriting to be in guideline language not essay language.  The place for such a proposal is probably WP:VPPOL, with notice at WP:VPPRO, WP:CENT, and some other good places, like WT:POLICY, WT:EDITING. In response to Crossroads's objection: misguided and unsalvageable content, including WP:FRINGE and WP:PROMO material, would surely qualify as "necessary" to revert.  Lots of stuff is not, including material that passes WP:V (verifi but doesn't have a citation ), and my personal peeve: mass-revert of 20 cleanup changes to get at one thing you disagree with (e.g. undoing 19 citation repairs because someone also inserted a serial comma in that editing pass and you hate serial commas).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:03, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the essay allows reverts in the scenarios Crossroads describes. Particularly where it says reverting is appropriate if "the edit makes the article clearly worse and there is no element of the edit that is an improvement." Anywikiuser (talk) 22:09, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I know that the essay does allow for reverting in such scenarios, but it still pushes too hard for trying to save it. It states:  On average, this will result in more bad content being preserved. Especially because if editors are discouraged from reverting poor additions, rather than going through the effort to comb through them, they will be tempted to just save it all. As for mass reverting good edits to get at a bad one, I haven't seen much of that, which I agree is bad. What I have seen often is bad content that ends up deleted, and when its origin is investigated, it was added by a user with an obvious agenda, and it stuck around for years because people decided at the time to leave it be. As for me, I myself do save the good parts of mixed quality edits, as do most editors I've interacted with. So, this essay is unnecessary as a guideline, as it would take us in the wrong direction. -Crossroads- (talk) 03:50, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal: Nominate essay as a guideline 

message: Regarding this addition by WhatamIdoing? I reverted, stating, "I don't agree with this. It's been discussed before, I think including at the BRD talk page. Editors revert to the status quo for discussion all the time. While an editor might think an edit is an improvement, they may also know that it's going to be controversial or an issue in some way and want to forestall that by first discussing it. If the addition is truly no problem, the talk page will resolve that." Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 04:58, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent addition -- about not edit reverting an edit one believes is an improvement.  

message: I, for one, agree with 's proposal; WP has made it just too easy to revert edits. Far easier than editing, that's for sure. That, by itself, contradicts this essay's assertion that  Perhaps this is due to an abundance of caution against vandalism, but that only means it is not true . In fact, the exact opposite is true. And the fact that this discussion was closed, in a clear attempt to shut off the proposal and shut up anyone who might agree with it, is further evidence of that.
— Guarapiranga ☎ 00:20, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Later conversation