[WikiEN-l] Re: Hi

Wed Jul 6 22:54:14 UTC 2005

On 7/7/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:

> If we kept the "standard" 3RR in addition to a new page based revert
> rule, one editor certainly could not hold pages hostage.  I didn't see
> anything in the previous proposal that suggested throwing away the old
> (but actually pretty young) 3RR rule.

I think it would be implicit.

I don't agree with locking a page for a set period of time, especially
if the change is a small one or the page is under development and only
a small section is controversial. By way of example, the dispute could
be over something like the BC/BCE problem and everything else in the
article is non-contentious.

Perhaps a page should be locked while the dispute is sorted out,
perhaps not. It really depends on the circumstances, and as it stands
it's up the admins to use common sense (or whatever else) to make a
decision on this. I can't see any reason to change that.

The idea behind the 3RR is to bring edit wars to a halt by blocking
out one or two editors in a dispute. But the problem is that victory
will go to whoever can whistle up more editors, and in theory we could
get edit wars going on for tens of reverts, with no individual editor
reverting more than a couple of times per day, and I presume that this
already occurs in some instances, notably religion, sex or politics.

More to the point, the final shape of the article will depend not on
truth or NPOV or some other wikivirtue, but on sheer numbers, and I
can't see this as being right and proper.

-- 
Peter in Canberra