Mandatory Acknowledging/Leaving Comments When Editing

Here's is something I've been seeing a lot of:

Alice makes an addition to a work or trope page. They publish it, and off they go.

Bob comes along and reads the new entry, and discovers there's a problem. Perhaps it was a misuse of a trope, or not actually an example. Perhaps it's natter or turning into a discussion. Maybe it was so badly written that Bob wasn't able to understand the point the entry is even trying to make. Regardless, the entry doesn't belong, so he removes the entry, and leaves a comment specifying why.

Alice, who is watching the page, discovers her edit was removed, and immediately restores their original entry without comment explaining why she thinks it does belong on the page.

So now Bob is in a pickle. The entry does not belong on the page, but if he removes it again it's the beginning of an Edit War. Now maybe Carol will come along and help Bob out by removing the change as well, leaving a comment reiterating why the entry was removed in the first place, but nothing is stopping Alice from simply readding it again.

At this point, the only recourse is for Bob or Carol to try contacting Alice directly, or bringing the matter up under the Discussion tab, or perhaps ATT to call attention to the issue. The problem is this process could potentially take time, especially if Alice refuses to engage Bob or Carol in the discussion.

So what I would propose is this:

When you click the Edit button, the Editor field is initially inactive. You must first read the most recent edit's comment and then click a button acknowledging that you have to enable the editor (maybe with a "type the Xth word to confirm" or something to prevent skimming like we all do with software licensing agreements) Additionally, you can't publish an Edit without providing a comment about your own edit in turn.

That sounds a bit excessive. I'm fine with mandatory edit reasons, but not forcing people to read the most recent edit reason. People are more likely to just gloss over them than to actually read them, and very rarely will the most recent edit reason actually be relevant to the edit one is making.

Yeah, you can shove horses to water but you can't make them drink, and the most recent edit reason is seldom relevant to the edit one is making.

I get that, I'm just thinking I've seen it often enough that it might help mitigate at least some of the Edit Warring.

Thing is, nothing in the scenario is stopping the edit war from happening. Even if Alice read the edit reasons, she could still keep re-adding it. It happens. People war in the edit reasons all the time.

This could help with accidental edit warring, but at the cost of making editing a pain for everyone else.

Yeah, in a lot of cases, edit reasons would just be redundant. If the only change in the edit is fixing a typo, there's no real need to put in "typo" as the edit reason.