Daniel P. B. Smith wrote: 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

Kelly Martin 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. Ec

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 geni wrote: 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 | / \