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On Programmers, thanks to the shiny new badge no doubt, dozens of tag wikis were suggested that directly copied Wikipedia and Stack Overflow's tag wikis. This violates the attribution requirement of the CC-BY-SA license, and generally makes for a really crappy tag wiki.

Someone with approval access to the suggested edit queue approved these en masse without checking to see if the content was plagiarized or copied. This presents a problem, as we can't have plagiarized or copyright-violating content on the site.

Unfortunately, what took the approver about 2 minutes to do can't be easily undone: we have to go back into each tag wiki, blank out the full description, and come up with a dummy tag wiki excerpt (since you can't save a tag wiki with a blank excerpt).

This is—for lack of a better word—insane. I get the value and draw of having low-friction approval mechanisms, but there needs to be a way to easily roll it back when people get it really, really wrong.

Please, think of the children mods: don't let bulk approvals exist without an appropriate bulk rollback mechanism.

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  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110726/… – Shog9 Feb 7 '12 at 19:29
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    Also, it could be a bit easier to see which tag wikis recently changed. (There is the Suggested edits Dashboard, but it is only for 10k-users, and only shows suggested edits - and not only tag wikis.) – Paŭlo Ebermann Feb 7 '12 at 19:44
  • (I don't have access to the suggested edits queue) When you say "bulk approved", is there an "Approve All" type button? Or are you saying someone just quickly clicked through them all ("Approve", "Approve", "Approve",..., done)? – Josh Darnell Feb 7 '12 at 20:10
  • @jadarnel27 The latter. If only it were that easy to roll back. – user149432 Feb 7 '12 at 20:23
  • This could probably be (mostly) solved by requiring two people to approve edits (as is currently required on Stack Overflow) – user102937 Feb 8 '12 at 1:11
  • Would be nice even to give an 8 hour buffer for tag wikis to mods and let them pass back to the 5k/20k view if they let it slip by – random Feb 8 '12 at 4:29

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