Jimmy- It's not supposed to minimally intrusive. It's supposed to be effective. Right now we have the situation that there is a set of users who are quite productive, but who use edit warring as a technique to get an article into the revision they want it to be in. That is so much in contradiction with everything we stand for that we should take immediate countermeasures. It creates a very bad impression for newbies if we let people get away with that kind of behavior without an immediate reaction. A 24 hour ban is not the same as a regular ban in the effects on the user. We can come up with a nice, friendly standard text, basically telling the user to calm down and when they are ready to respect our policies, please return to editing. It won't develop into the kind of problems we had with Lir, because there's no incentive to create another identity if you can just keep editing under your regular one 24 hours later. We could even add a clause that if they pledge to stop edit warring immediately, they can be unbanned immediately (of course if they break that pledge, they will be rebanned). Now some people will bring up the issue of "rights" and "speech". But edit warring is an effective method to suppress other people's speech and to abuse other people's rights. It's like shouting over whatever someone else tries to say. The other person can either also start shouting, or give up in frustration. In any civil discussion in the real world, you would tell someone who tries to shout down everyone else to leave until they calm down. All I, and many others, are asking for is to apply that same principle to Wikipedia. Regards, Erik

Jimmy Wales wrote As we speak, Wik and Anthony Di Pierro have both reverted [[interesting and uninteresting numbers]] three times - within a total time of 19 minutes. Assuming this is not a circus, we need to have the three-revert rule to deal with these clowns, and really as soon as possible. Charles

Delirium wrote: I prefer guidelines instead of rules. The people who set about to "enforce" a rule can easily be as much of a problem as those they are criticising. Admittedly, some of those same people see very little difference between a guideline and a rule. I agree that these matters need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. A person who engages in a protracted revert war on a single article is very different from one who repeatedly does this across a broad range of articles. Ec

Just to keep everyone guessing here, ha ha, I'm actually very sympathetic to what Mark is saying. One of the things that's tempting about the 3-revert rule is that it's easy to administer and judge after the fact. There are precious few borderline cases. Reverting is reverting, anyone can check the logs after the fact and see it. This is very different from subjective judgments like "hostility" and "rude" and even "vandalism". If we had a rule that say "3 reverts and you're out for 24 hours", it would be fairly hard for sysops to abuse it. It at least has that as a merit. Delirium wrote:

On 03/10/04 06:50, Nikola Smolenski wrote: Or one user with three names. - d.

Fred Bauder wrote a political viewpoint I think this does happen to some extent (it may go on in the Oder-Neisse line disputes, for example). If this were used systematically under a three-revert limitation, that would be easy to see from a page history after a week. (Which isn't so long in wiki time, in fact.) Charles

Delirium wrote: OK! But if we're going to do that, it has to apply to both parties in an edit war, even when the dispute involves an acknowledged idiot versus a respected sysop. :-) Every edit war has at least two participants. Ec

At 09:43 AM 3/9/2004 -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote: If it really is an acknowledged idiot, it shouldn't be too hard to get three respected sysops (or anyone else who happens along for that matter) to each perform a single revert.

On Wednesday 10 March 2004 10:50, Charles Matthews wrote: Factions fighting against single users are not a serious danger?

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Charles Matthews wrote: It's not that hard to find: look at the page history for any topic touching on Israel or Palestine. Geoff

Please forgive me if this has already been suggested; I only just subscribed to this list yesterday. I think the 3-revert should be a guideline, with a direct warning on the user's talk page when it is violated. If the user continues to revert the page, and doesn't at that point start having a sane conversation about how to deal with the issue, then the person is being obsequious and uncommunicative and that is ample reason for a 24-hour ban. moink On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote: