WRers have discussed at great length the harm that three admin tools -- (un)deletion, (un)protection, and (un)blocking -- can cause. There hasn't been much discussion, though, on formerly-admin tools (rollback and ip block exemption) admin abilities (deleted page viewing, history merges, moves over other articles, rollback granting, unwatched pages, account creation, ip block exemption grant), or the dozens of non-admin tools that can be added to the toolbox (watchlist and live feeds, related changes, citation fixers, history and traffic stats, the spellchecker, etc) or come automatically (undo).

A thorough discussion of Wikipedia's problems should include discussion of the misuse of tools outside of deletion, protection, and blocking.

History merges can be performed on articles where two articles have been combined but the GDFL history is incorrect. The tool is supposed to fix GDFL compliance issues. Yet few administrators are ever taught about the importance of GDFL, history merges, or how to use the tool, potentially leading to many mistakes.

Rollback can be granted to just about anyone by an administrator; rollback was previously regarded as too potentially damaging to articles to give it away. Yet since January, it has been given out to almost anyone who asked for it. The rollback feature is supposed to be used to remove vandalism, but is frequently used in edit wars to quickly "win" article battles. Undo is essentially the same feature.

The watchlist and the many live feed tools are also used to combat vandalism, but can be used to promote "ownership" of articles. Additionally, watchlists of inactive users give a false impression of which articles are being monitored for vandalism at Special:watchlist.

IP block exemption granting was introduced in January of this year. It can be granted to any user in good standing. Yet the tool has attracted little (if any?) notice on WR, despite several WR users (Fozzie, Mercury, and Lar, namely) behind the original proposal.

There are some very nice citation fixing tools which normally appear in the toolbox when a script is added to the user's monobook. They can save hours of work fixing or completing partly incomplete citations. The DOI citation link is one such tool. Yet even this seemingly innocuous tool can damage articles. The tool doesn't (or didn't?) reliably add an appropriate alerting edit summary when automatically tagging a dead link.(link to an example) Adding maintenance tags to articles semi-invisibly (because a flagged bot does the actual edit) without leaving a full edit summary means that articles may get tagged for needing maintenance without alerting anyone that maintenance is even required.

Rollback is no big deal, IMO. It's unlikely that "rollback abuse" would lead to anything scandalous, though it may intensify edit-warring in some instances...


Yeah, and people keep transposing the letters! Damn them! Damn them all to hell!


The watchlist is the fundamental essence of the entire wiki problem, at least from an ergonomic perspective. If they got rid of it, half (maybe more) of what we call "abuse" and "POV pushing" would go away overnight, but that's partially because nobody would edit anything at all without it. It would just be too much of a pain in the arse.


There was a smidgen of discussion about it in the IPBlock exemption is now live thread, in which one or two people suggested that it would allow admins (and presumably established editors with admin support who obtain the exemptions) to "sockpuppet with impunity." It's difficult to say whether or not that's actually happening, of course... I guess that's the whole point!

My own question as to whether or not it would be known as the "AB rule" wasn't entirely facetious - ostensibly, the exemptions were for Tor (and other IP anonymizing-service) users who had been "productive" editors but had become ensnared in range-blocks made against proxy addresses. My guess would be that the number of people who felt they had a legitimate need for such exemptions was so small, they were probably taken care of within the first week or so. I'd be surprised if they get more than one or two requests a week these days, though I could always be wrong about that... Is there a log of them somewhere? (I mean, there probably is, I just haven't looked.)

History merges are so easy to do. Delete, move, undelete BINGO! It is quite powerful tool though - i pity the poor fool who ever had to unmerge something like Jesus and Hitler... (I doubt either of them can be deleted due to the 5000 revision rule)

No scandals, but the tool, if misused, contributes to an unpleasant editing environment.



*Slaps forehead* That's not the first time I've done that, either.



Thanks for the link, Somey; I had missed that discussion. There is indeed a log of IP block exemptions, here. As you correctly surmised, it's not an extensive list. There's also no direct evidence that any of these users are abusing the exemption. However, the exemption can be abused, and most certainly will be at some point.

I do wonder if Armed is still editing. Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption
indicates the exemption still can't be requested for anonymous proxy editing:






Is this a hypothetical merger, or did this take place at some point?

The watchlist is great. Whenever I get the niggling desire to go back to Wikipedia, all I need to do is look at my watchlist and see how everything is going to pot. Works every time.


The simple "edit" tool contributes enough to an unpleasant editing environment.