* 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 just mistakenly acting on out of date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'.