I know en is suffering from a seeming increase in the number of people who engage in high speed vandal attacks. My guess is other Wikipedias, if they don't already get this, will. Certainly, there are some technical measures in place and being put in place. Rollbacks on page moves are nice, plugging the interwiki redirect hole is very nice. But new problems will come up, and some of the existing problems (Page creation vandalism) won't go away with an easy technical solution addressing that specific problem.
What would be the result/problem/whatever of an edit speed throttle on new accounts. I'm thinking an edit a minute for the first 100 edits. I know edit count is a resource intensive query, so presumably some sort of technical wizardry would need to be come up with to check whether or not the throttle should be set. I'd assume the easiest way to do this would be to only check to see if the throttle should be lifted. That is, have the edit count only be employed if the editor is currently throttled - once 100 edits hits, the check wouldn't need to be performed anymore. Perhaps a new function could also be written that would be less database intensive but only check edits up to a certain number. (That is, instead of doing horrifyingly huge checks on users like Rambot who have millions of edits, once it notices that the number exceeds 100, it stops)
I don't know the tech answers here as I'm not a dev. My main two questions are:
1) Is an edit throttle feasable? 2) What good reasons are there to not throttle contributors for their first 100 edits so that they cannot launch widespread changes? (That is, does anything that people tend to do in their first 100 edits actually require editing more than once a minute?)
-Snowspinner