On 1/31/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@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.