[WikiEN-l] Autoconfirmed threshold

[Simetrical]

On 1/31/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> The reason I suggest it is because the reason most people give for an
> edit count requirement is that once you've reached X edits, we'll know
> if you're a vandal or not. However, us knowing isn't much good if you
> get autoconfirmed anyway. Unless we want to indef block all registered
> vandals as their first block, an edit count is useless without it
> being possible to prevent autoconfirming if the edits aren't
> acceptable ones.

Interesting point.  At present, the reason for autoconfirmed is
basically to stop certain forms of casual vandalism.  You have to do
some preparation if you want to engage in page-move vandalism, which
due to software limitations has historically been more of a pain to
deal with.  I would tend to view edit counts as an extension of this:
not only must you sign up and wait, you also have to make some
innocuous edits.

I suspect that if a user is dedicated and sinister enough to plan out
ten edits and four days to get autoconfirmed before going on a
page-move spree, he's probably going to make some whitespace changes
with his ten edits, not vandalism, so I'm not sure this will help at
all.