"Part of the problem is that quite a few people (Anthony is certainly not
the only one - others have been debated here on the list as well) seem
to feel perfectly justified in violating the 3-revert guideline."
The 3-revert guideline is not very useful when a group of people gang up
against another and refuse to discuss their point of view. The closest I
got to an explanation was "REVERT - YOU DO NOT CHANGE THE FEATURED ARTICLE.
PERIOD. User:Raul654 changes the featured article. NOT User:Anthony
DiPierro." While we're discussing violation of the 3-revert guideline,
let's also discuss violation of the guidelines on use of the rollback
button, which is meant for reverting anonymous vandals. I was neither
anonymous nor a vandal, yet the first and majority of the reverts of my
contribution were made using the rollback button. Let's talk about
violation of the page protection guidelines. Raul is not only reverting
without explanation, he's reverting without violation and then protecting
the page. Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored,
such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.
Then, when we're done talking about all that, let's look at the hypocrisy
that is going on here. We call ourselves a free encyclopedia, yet edit wars
are fought and people are blocked so that we can feature non-free images on
the front page. Our page explaining administrators says that sysops "are
not imbued with any special authority, and are equal to everybody else in
terms of editorial responsibility" yet failure to obey orders made by
administrators results in blocks and bans. We talk about consensus all over
the place, but all we do is vote. The viewpoints of the minority are
virtually never taken into consideration. Why should 3 people compromise
against 2 when 9 reverts is more than 6?
So yes, I ignore the 3-revert guideline, at least, the one written on
Wikipedia:revert. You have to ignore some of the guidelines, or you
wouldn't get anything done at all. There's even a rule telling people to
ignore all rules, complete with Jimbo's signature on it.