* Ray Saintonge wrote:
Anything but a one free revert policy makes no sense at all. There are just too many reasons why one admin might revert the actions of another. Some are good reasons; others are very bad.
Actually, I think this focus on 'sequence of reverts' misses the point. Even the FIRST admin action could be the start of what I would call a 'wheel war'... yet the third might not. How does that make sense? It's all about 'good faith'.
If someone takes an admin action that they KNOW one or more other admins are going to object to and almost certainly revert then that person is responsible for 'starting' the wheel war... it doesn't matter that they didn't reverse the action of another admin. They took an admin action which they knew was not supported by general consensus. Now usually that doesn't happen because we don't know how other admins are going to react, but sometimes we obviously do and we shouldn't give the instigator a pass just because they got out there with a non-consensus action FIRST. If anything that makes them 'the troublemaker'.
In contrast, the reversion of an admin action is NOT always the start of a 'wheel war'. There are various templates which were 'protected indefinitely' because of high use. When I have found that some of these have been deprecated into near non-existence I have unprotected them... without tracking down the admin who protected them in the first place to 'discuss' it. Admins do things like this every day... and they SHOULD. That's not 'wheel warring'... that's simply the reasonable assumption that the original admin would agree that protection is no longer needed. If some other admin sees my unprotect and says 'Ack! That's the most heavily used template in the world - it needs to be protected!' they aren't 'wheel-warring' either... just mistakenly acting on out of date information in good faith.
So far as I'm concerned admin actions become a problem when the admin taking them KNOWS that the action is going to be objected to by other admins, but goes ahead anyway without gathering consensus. It doesn't matter if that's the first admin action or the fifth. Obviously it is not always easy to determine whether someone is being deliberately confrontational vs making a good faith change that they assume will be ok - and that's where the sequence starts to play a part as it becomes more difficult to NOT realize that an action is controversial after it has been reverted. However, any hard and fast rules on 'first revert' or 'second revert' seem to me a bad idea. Any admin taking an admin action (without consensus after discussion) that they know other admins will find objectionable is acting in bad faith regardless of the 'sequence'.