[WikiEN-l] More thoughts on the 3-revert rule

Sat Feb 12 15:34:41 UTC 2005

Anyone can accidently get caught up in the 3-revert net as it is now
written. Best to take it as an opportunity to take a brief vacation. The
general prevalence of edit wars in certain areas was what brought this
rather rough cut rule on. It occasionally catches up the unwary and the
innocent. No sense of blame or guilt is appropriate.

Fred 

> From: "Bill Konrad" <bkonrad123 at sbcglobal.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 10:04:51 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] More thoughts on the 3-revert rule
> 
> I was blocked yesterday for violating the 3RR. I don't fault Geni for doing
> this, as it was within the letter of the 3RR. However, I have questions
> about what the intent of the rule is. Is the rule intended as punishment of
> any technical violation of 3RR, even where the conflict causing the reverts
> has been resolved? Or is it supposed to be a mechanism for putting an end
> (or at least a cease-fire) to active edit wars?
> 
> Here's the short version, from my perspective. Some users figured out a way
> to use templates to produce a table of contents for categories. At Wikipedia
> talk:Categorization, this was generally seen as a very good thing for
> navigating large categories (and indeed may minimize some of the rationale
> for creating certain types of sub-categories merely to reduce the size of
> the parent category). Netoholic took it upon himself to "improve" the
> templates without much in the way of explanation about what he was doing. I
> reverted his changes as he seemed to be the only person who saw any problem
> and and a few other persons also questioned the changes he was attempting to
> impose. It was only after a few set of reversions that it finally came out
> that there are dramatic difference in the way that IE and Firefox display
> the templates. After understanding just how dramatic the differences are, I
> withdrew my objections to Netoholic's change. This was at 19:58, Feb 11,
> 2005. The last reversion I made was at 15:45, Feb 11, 2005.
> 
> However, before this, at 16:17, Feb 11, 2005, Netoholic had filed a
> complaint about me on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR. I don't
> dispute that I reverted four times to the same version (while Netoholic
> reverted twice on two separate times to somewhat different versions). Since
> I generally avoid making multiple reversions, I simply was not paying that
> close attention to the revert rule and the timing of my reverts -- I was
> reacting to what appeared to be Netoholic unilaterally imposing changes,
> without adequately explaining the rationale and despite questions and
> opposition to his changes. Basically, it looked as though Netoholic was the
> only person who saw a problem with the templates and was not especially
> effective in explaining what he saw as the problem. I and others saw
> Netoholic's changes as clearly inferior (and indeed the second set of
> changes made the template nearly unusable in Firefox), so I do not feel any
> compunction about reverting these changes. Once it became clear just how
> dramatic the differences between IE and Firefox were, I agreed that one of
> Netoholic's earlier versions was the best choice as being least problematic
> in both browsers. So that was the end of the reversions. No more edit war.
> 
> However, the block was not imposed until 02:23, 12 Feb 2005, some several
> hours after the end of any disagreement between me and Netoholic.
> 
> So to my mind, this raises some questions -- Should the current state of the
> "edit war" be taken into account when imposing a block for violation of 3RR?
> If whatever dispute was at the root of the reversion has been resolved, does
> it make sense to impose a block as punishment for earlier violations (and
> especially as this was not a case of a repeat edit warrior who perhaps might
> need a slap on the hands as a reminder)? I mean, I certainly don't see
> myself as an edit warrior, and I'd be very surprised if anyone else saw me
> as such.
> 
> Bkonrad
> 
> 
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