"Andrew Lih" wrote:

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:53:44 -0700, Tom Haws hawstom@sprintmail.com wrote:

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Fresh thinking and good point against *enforcing* the 3RR. But I don't completely understand the next paragraph. Can you restate?

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The problem with 3RR as it's being practiced now -- it assigns blame much too early in the process, without even an attempt to stabilize the situation and let cooler heads prevail.

Sure. Before the 3RR, the standard procedure was for an uninvolved admin to come in and protect a page with an edit war, so no one could edit it. The parties were forced to go to the Talk page to hash something out. No one was declared right or wrong, no individuals were singled out and the admin didn't care about the relative viewpoints.

After an unspecified amount of time the page would be unprotected so the article could be updated.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Exactly. And thank you for making the point that while a page may be protected, the talk for that page is not. In extreme cases (as was done some time ago with "Terrorism," in which the editors were almost literally at each throats) the page is protected, and a "working version" is set up as a subpage. This is not protected (obviously) and everyone can edit it and argue, straw poll, etc., to their heart's content. It took a month or so, but a pretty nice version (IMO) was hacked out and all the "warriors" signed off on it.

3RR is just a meatax, and it's a selected meatax.

--C