From: steve v vertigosteve@yahoo.com
Easy to say. You dont have right-wing nutcases tag team reverting your rewrites.
That's a difficult problem, maybe impossible.
But it can't be solved by Wikilawyering the number of reverts complaining about what computer programmers call "fencepost errors" in counting reverts, or when 24 hours begins, or whether you get an extra hour if the change from Daylight Savings to standard time happens during the 24 hours... or anything like that.
Although Wikipedia is not supposed to be majoritarian, if you have a garden-variety revert war between one person and many, yes, the many can effectively impose their will. As far as I know, the only remedy is to patiently conduct discussions, gain consensus, and then ask for help when you can show that people are reverting against consensus.
That may not work, either.
All I can say is that fussing about how many reverts you get to make and whether some sysop counted them properly isn't going to help.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
On 10/3/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
Although Wikipedia is not supposed to be majoritarian, if you have a garden-variety revert war between one person and many, yes, the many can effectively impose their will. As far as I know, the only remedy is to patiently conduct discussions, gain consensus, and then ask for help when you can show that people are reverting against consensus.
Yes, but how many times have we seen someone who was in the losing side in one of those battles that wasn't pushing a POV?
Kelly
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From: steve v vertigosteve@yahoo.com
Easy to say. You dont have right-wing nutcases tag team reverting your rewrites.
That's a difficult problem, maybe impossible.
But it can't be solved by Wikilawyering the number of reverts complaining about what computer programmers call "fencepost errors" in counting reverts, or when 24 hours begins, or whether you get an extra hour if the change from Daylight Savings to standard time happens during the 24 hours... or anything like that.
All I can say is that fussing about how many reverts you get to make and whether some sysop counted them properly isn't going to help.
The 3RR does nothing more than cool down a debate for a little while. It has nothing to do with the substance of the debate. Whatever the state of a particular article when the 3RR is invoked it still needs work before a solution can be found.
If I were in such an edit war, I could carefully follow the time limits, and be perfectly within the rules when my fourt revert was entered 24 hours and one minute after the clock started running, but the biggest criticism of that practice is that I would be wasting my own time.
Ec
On 10/4/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
If I were in such an edit war, I could carefully follow the time limits, and be perfectly within the rules when my fourt revert was entered 24 hours and one minute after the clock started running, but the biggest criticism of that practice is that I would be wasting my own time.
Someone was blocked a while back for a revert at 24 hours and 8 minutes. The block stood, as I recall.
Kelly
Kelly Martin wrote:
On 10/4/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
If I were in such an edit war, I could carefully follow the time limits, and be perfectly within the rules when my fourt revert was entered 24 hours and one minute after the clock started running, but the biggest criticism of that practice is that I would be wasting my own time.
Someone was blocked a while back for a revert at 24 hours and 8 minutes. The block stood, as I recall.
But why bother? The claim that he was gaming the system may be perfectly correct, but you can expect that when you have a context of rigid rules. Both parties are being stupid and wasting time.
Ec
On 10/4/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
But why bother? The claim that he was gaming the system may be perfectly correct, but you can expect that when you have a context of rigid rules. Both parties are being stupid and wasting time.
When you have blocked someone for breaking the rule by 3 minutes then it is hard to justify not blocking someone who reverted 4 minutes latter. The rule is not as solid as some people think there has always been action against people gameing the rule.
-- geni
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
geni wrote:
On 10/4/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
But why bother? The claim that he was gaming the system may be perfectly correct, but you can expect that when you have a context of rigid rules. Both parties are being stupid and wasting time.
When you have blocked someone for breaking the rule by 3 minutes then it is hard to justify not blocking someone who reverted 4 minutes latter. The rule is not as solid as some people think there has always been action against people gameing the rule.
It's definitely a slippery slope. I believe somewhere in the rules there's a page about gaming the system, even using 3rr as an example. This is why we have IAR. It reminds us to follow the spirit of the rules, not the letter. 3RR is all about not reverting excessively. I remember recently looking at [[Bill Oddie]] to get diffs for the RFC on Pigsonthewing. If you look at that page, there was a revert war involving him for almost a month. Exactly three reverts per day. He eventually slipped and got 3RR.
Of course, there were others in the revert war too. They weren't any more innocent then he was. Certainly, if you're going to call anything gaming the system, this is a good example. And then the slippery slope happens and you start blocking people for 6 reverts in two days after a while...
3RR is only good for one thing. It gives us a nice low threshold to "excessive reverting", which quite a few of us would not consider excessive, in the context of one day. But certainly, everyone knows that a revert war lasting an entire month is excessive.
Personally, I would have protected the article after the first few days. Less controversial then blocking the users, and you get the same results. The edit button is just as useless during an edit war as it is while a page is protected.
[[WP:3RR]] says "It does not grant users an inalienable right to three reverts every 24 hours or endorse reverts as an editing technique. Persistent reversion remains strongly discouraged and is unlikely to constitute working properly with others." This is all the policy that is required to prevent it, yet people do not use it to stop edit wars. If there's one person reverting, block them for it. If there's more, protect it. And since this is listed on [[WP:3RR]], it is STILL in violation of the 3RR rule, even if you do not make 4 reverts in one day.
I wish I read that rule this closely before, would have kept me from needing to use IAR. But in a way, that's an IAR clause anyway.
- -- Phroziac | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xC2AF5417 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/anya2 | / \