[WikiEN-l] Re: Socks; 3RR policy change

Tue Nov 16 15:44:55 UTC 2004

> Regarding sockpuppets and the 3RR rule.

> I'm sympathetic.  It's a tough problem, though.

I disagree that it is tough, because there are so many sites that deal
with it effectively.  Meatball, for example, publicly logs all IPs, and
you can spot a sock a mile away.  That doesn't mean that we have to do
this --- several UBB forums where I post regularly log IPs privately
but make them available upon request to administrators, so as to
mitigate privacy concerns.  Administrators on these boards routinely
boot sockpuppets.

> However, I think our biggest headache has been the sort of user who is
> *above* using sockpuppets, but *not above* getting into a revert war
> so long as we didn't have enforcement.

I'm unsure.  People find varying editing patterns problematic depending
on their own approach to the project.  You might be right for, say,
"Empire of Atlantium" and similar articles that have been the subject
of ongoing, learned revert wars.  On the other hand, if you were to
edit the Libertarianism articles for a time, you might conclude that
our biggest headache is elsewhere.  The nature and extent of the
difference in the "Wikipedia experience" resulting from individual
editing patterns was something that took me a long time to appreciate,
and I think it is among the underlying reasons why we have trouble
getting consensus on policy.

The reason I am concerned about the 3RR in its present form is that it
would put honest contributors in these battlezone articles like
Libertarianism at an unfair disadvantage.  That's demoralizing, and I
believe it is likely to lead good contributors to focus on less
controversial areas of the project, leaving libertarianism to the POV
warriors.  I oppose the 3RR enforcement change mainly because it hurts
these good contributors, and consider that a poor tradeoff for its
beneficial effects elsewhere.

There are other problems, chief among them being the likelihood of
inadvertent violations, but I am less concerned about that.

> Malicious sockpuppetry is a very very low form of behavior.

I see this mainly with POV warriors who show up with an agenda in mind
and don't care in the least for the project's social norms.  Not
everyone comes to Wikipedia to help with the encyclopedia.

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