Regarding sockpuppets and the 3RR rule.
I'm sympathetic. It's a tough problem, though.
I disagree that it is tough, because there are so many sites that deal with it effectively. Meatball, for example, publicly logs all IPs, and you can spot a sock a mile away. That doesn't mean that we have to do this --- several UBB forums where I post regularly log IPs privately but make them available upon request to administrators, so as to mitigate privacy concerns. Administrators on these boards routinely boot sockpuppets.
However, I think our biggest headache has been the sort of user who is *above* using sockpuppets, but *not above* getting into a revert war so long as we didn't have enforcement.
I'm unsure. People find varying editing patterns problematic depending on their own approach to the project. You might be right for, say, "Empire of Atlantium" and similar articles that have been the subject of ongoing, learned revert wars. On the other hand, if you were to edit the Libertarianism articles for a time, you might conclude that our biggest headache is elsewhere. The nature and extent of the difference in the "Wikipedia experience" resulting from individual editing patterns was something that took me a long time to appreciate, and I think it is among the underlying reasons why we have trouble getting consensus on policy.
The reason I am concerned about the 3RR in its present form is that it would put honest contributors in these battlezone articles like Libertarianism at an unfair disadvantage. That's demoralizing, and I believe it is likely to lead good contributors to focus on less controversial areas of the project, leaving libertarianism to the POV warriors. I oppose the 3RR enforcement change mainly because it hurts these good contributors, and consider that a poor tradeoff for its beneficial effects elsewhere.
There are other problems, chief among them being the likelihood of inadvertent violations, but I am less concerned about that.
Malicious sockpuppetry is a very very low form of behavior.
I see this mainly with POV warriors who show up with an agenda in mind and don't care in the least for the project's social norms. Not everyone comes to Wikipedia to help with the encyclopedia.
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