On 7/7/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@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.