A had a thought and I'd like to get some opinions on it. There was an issue recently where Cantus had flagarantly violated the three-revert limit on several articles. But, since quickpolls are currently out of the question, an admin would have to be a vigilante to block him.
My thought was - why not give all admins discretionary authority to temp-ban (for 24 hours) anyone who violates the three revert rule? It would give the rule some teeth, and it would keep the quickpolls relatively uncluttered (which was the biggest complaint - that they were being used frivilously). It wouldn't have to be applied in all cases, but just one where the admin thinks that the involved user(s) need a time-out. If someone thinks they are unfairly banned, they could bring it up on the Request for review of Admin actions. Quickpolls could be reserved for persistantly bad behavior.
I'd like some feedback to see what everyone thinks.
--Mark
mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
My thought was - why not give all admins discretionary authority to temp-ban (for 24 hours) anyone who violates the three revert rule? It would give the rule some teeth, and it would keep the quickpolls relatively uncluttered (which was the biggest complaint
- that they were being used frivilously).
Why not restrict the start of QuickPolls to sysops? That is, the rule can be that you can't start a QuickPoll for little reasons, and this is much easier to enforce if we say that QuickPolls are to be started by sysops. Sysops have been around long enough to know the ropes.
This would keep there from being too many frivolous quickpolls, but would not require the one thing that I keep resisting strongly -- individual discretionary authority, which is too easy to abuse, but not only that gives grounds for people to raise holy hell about discreationary abuse even when it doesn't exist.
It's easy to say "Waaah, Erik did something mean to me." It's a lot harder to (convincingly) say "Waaah, 80% of the voters did something mean to me."
I share the concerns that have been raised about the problem of quickpolls being used as popularity contests, such that the results for different people who do the same thing are different. That's not good.
At least when I was dictator, I was consistent in the sense of consistently letting people get away with just about anything. :-)
--Jimbo
On Wed, 5 May 2004 14:25:25 -0700, Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote: Why not restrict the start of QuickPolls to sysops? That is, the rule can be that you can't start a QuickPoll for little reasons, and this is much easier to enforce if we say that QuickPolls are to be started by sysops. Sysops have been around long enough to know the ropes.
Perhaps so. It should be trivial to convince certain sysops to start quickpolls. On the other hand, it raises more concerns about sysops being called a cabal.