A proposal to increase the requirements for autoconfirm has been started (and looks to be gaining quite significant support) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal/Poll . Particularly strong is the proposal to increase autoconfirm to 7 days and 20 edits. Personally, I think this is a good thing for the reasons listed on that page but obviously it is good to have maximum awareness for what is quite a significant change when you consider the actions that only autoconfimed users can do (upload, edit sprotect and move etc.) It is probably better that we all post our ideas there rather than having both that page and an e-mail thread and it will be nice to see what the comments are on this.
G Donato