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geni wrote:
On 10/4/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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.
- --
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