I know en is suffering from a seeming increase in the number of people
who engage in high speed vandal attacks. My guess is other Wikipedias,
if they don't already get this, will. Certainly, there are some
technical measures in place and being put in place. Rollbacks on page
moves are nice, plugging the interwiki redirect hole is very nice. But
new problems will come up, and some of the existing problems (Page
creation vandalism) won't go away with an easy technical solution
addressing that specific problem.
What would be the result/problem/whatever of an edit speed throttle on
new accounts. I'm thinking an edit a minute for the first 100 edits. I
know edit count is a resource intensive query, so presumably some sort
of technical wizardry would need to be come up with to check whether or
not the throttle should be set. I'd assume the easiest way to do this
would be to only check to see if the throttle should be lifted. That
is, have the edit count only be employed if the editor is currently
throttled - once 100 edits hits, the check wouldn't need to be
performed anymore. Perhaps a new function could also be written that
would be less database intensive but only check edits up to a certain
number. (That is, instead of doing horrifyingly huge checks on users
like Rambot who have millions of edits, once it notices that the number
exceeds 100, it stops)
I don't know the tech answers here as I'm not a dev. My main two
questions are:
1) Is an edit throttle feasable?
2) What good reasons are there to not throttle contributors for their
first 100 edits so that they cannot launch widespread changes? (That
is, does anything that people tend to do in their first 100 edits
actually require editing more than once a minute?)
-Snowspinner