I personally see 3RR quite useful in certain circumstances. It's quite often a hot-headed newcomer's first block. It seems that a lot of people see the openness of Wikipedia and say "Hey! This is great! I can do whatever I want and push whatever viewpoint I want," and quite quickly get into edit warring and shouting insults, paying no heed to requests to be civil and warnings about edit warring. I think the 3RR block serves as a quick slap: "Stop that: this is a community, and here we abide by certain principles".
I believe that as a hot-headed-newbie slap it works well. It's one of our few cut-and-dry rules, and so doesn't rely on any subjective notion of "being a jerk".
I don't know if in other situations the rule is broken. However, I can well imagine the state of affairs on various disputed articles were this rule not in place.
Sam
-- Asbestos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos
On 12/14/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Jtkiefer jtkiefer@wordzen.net wrote:
It's gotten to the point where 3RR has become unenforceable. Any administrator who tries to enforce 3RR regulations posted on AN/3RR
are
subsequently villified, accused of bias, amd/or threatened with an RFC if they continue doing their job. Due to this many editors stay away from enforcing 3RR and I think something needs to be changed so that admnistrators can actually enforce this rule without fear.
The 3RR was one of those ideas that may have seemed good at the time (I supported the proposal). In practice it seems to be used for two bad purposes:
- to justify the notion that making up to three reverts per day is a
normal mode of editing
- to bait hotheads and get them into trouble
That is more a symptom of other problems, though (and I say this as someone who doesn't support the 3RR as a rule but only a guideline).
There needs to be better mechanisms for dispute resolution: somewhere people can turn to when they disagree over an article and using the talk page is not resolving the problem; somewhere where there are established precedents for dealing with certain types of situations that come up over and over again; somewhere that the wise citizens of Wikipedia occassionally hang out in and can diffuse the situations by pointing to policies and precedents. This would make both revert wars and the 3RR unnecessary.
I see the proper place for this as the RfC page. But the RfC page is not utilized very well. But then again, maybe I'm overoptimistic as to how easy these things are to resolve. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l