On 6/30/07, Royalguard11 royalguard11@gmail.com wrote:
There was a thread about this in the list back in January, but nothing happened because of it. So I started an on-wiki proposal about this (which was adding a certain edit count to the autoconfirmed threshold) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal . I hope that everyone goes there and at least gives an opinion (and maybe this email will actually make it to the list this time).
Any threshold or combination of thresholds will be next to useless if publicly explained.
The community fears the unknown and will not vote to approve anything that isn't publicly explained.
If somebody is taking the trouble to stockpile accounts, this extra hurdles is an easy one to jump, unless of course they don't know how high it is.
Realistically a threshold of "X days after the user's Nth edit (with inactive days not counting toward X)" could be quite effective, but only if X and N are secret numbers.
—C.W.