[WikiEN-l] Assuming consensus

[Ron Ritzman]

On 1/9/07, Bob Petrovich <wrestfan01 at gmail.com> wrote:

[changes to facebuster article]

> Samuel Blanning not only took it on himself to block me, but to remove my
> corrections from the pages, after I reported the harassment by Paulley and
> Naohiro19, who were threatening me as they continually tried to vandalize
> wikipedia and accused me of vandalism for making factual corrections.

Might this be good advice for editors facing resistance to their edits
in some articles.

If you make a change in an article and that change is reverted by an
ip address or a user with no history of editing the article in
question, assume no consensus for the previous state of the article
and add your changes back. If it's just one editor doing the
reverting, he'll violate 3RR before you will.

However, if your changes are reverted by an editor with a history of
contributing to the article in question, then assume that there's
consensus for the current state of the article. Persisting at this
point might (perhaps incorrectly) make you look like a troll or a
vandal, especially of such changes have been attempted in the past. If
one of the editors is also an admin then you might even be blocked as
a "sock puppet" of the previous "troll". (this is why it's a good idea
to register an account and have a non troll/non vandal editing history
before "going to war") The best thing to do in this case is to bring
your case to the article's talk page. Bring plenty of references
because your probably going to need them. Chances are they've gone
over this issue numerous times in the past. Read the talk page's
archives to see of this is the case.

If you still can't convince them then just accept the fact that you
are not going to win this one and go play elsewhere.