On 6/20/06, Jon Awbrey jawbrey@att.net wrote:.
I am speaking for what I know to be the generic attitude of folks who take things like accuracy and verifiability seriously, who do not suffer fools gladly, as the saying goes, when it comes to that. It's clear to me that most folks like that would have walked away, probably quietly but no less disgustedly, long before putting up with the kind of sophomoric toilet-papering that I have had to put up with on this score.
I'm sorry if you found our rules like 3RR and our dispute resolution process cumbersome and uninviting. As flawed as these may be, try to imagine what Wikipedia would be like *without* these rules. The 3RR is not that old, and prior to its implementation, edit warriors could revert a dozen times a day (I think the record I personally witnessed was 14) with impunity, a single edit warrior could essentially hold an article hostage for months. While it would be nice to summarily ban idiots or pov pushers or conspiracy nuts, etc., what metric do you propose we use to separate the wheat from the chaff? Who gets just three reverts and who gets more? How do we decide? It's not often that clear, and some trolls can talk a good game when they need to appear reasonable and sane.
I know from personal experience that it is frustrating to deal with stubborn nutjobs, and frustrating to deal with a system that treats you and the nutjob as equal players, but I haven't seen any serious proposal for a better system or one that doesn't introduce more problems, or reintroduce problems we've largely got a handle on. By and large, consensus works well. It can sometimes be difficult to get enough sane eyes on a particular article, but it can be done.