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If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
Opening post
Due to a recent incident, I've remembered a small flaw in our rules against edit wars that I think should be addressed. It's not anything major, I've thought about it before and not brought it up, but there's a small contradiction between T:NO WARS as it's currently written and T:BOUND.
T:NO WARS says that we hit an edit war if a user reverts edits 4 times in 36 hours. Okay, reasonable. But consider a situation where a user is flagrantly violating policy, even if it's done so in good faith, so doesn't qualify for the "obvious vandalism" exception. Per T:BOUND the appropriate thing is for the page to stay as it was before the original change and there to be a discussion on this per the talk page. But instead, per how T:NO WARS is written, we technically find ourselves in a situation where the reverse happens. The first user makes the edit, the second hits undo, the first hits undo, and we're back to the version of the page which violates policy. If there's an even number of reverts between two users the page will always be in the policy breaking form, so the first person to reach four reversions will be the user trying to uphold current policy.
In practice this has never really come up, people understand that sometimes hitting 4 or 5 reverts is contextually less bad than other times, and as a corollary upholding T:BOUND through one extra revert before calling it quits has never seemed to be an issue. But just on principle I think we should probably tweak them slightly. Say that one edit + 3 reverts vs 4 reverts constitutes an edit war, for instance. This is potentially something we may wish to not do, however, as it does run somewhat counter to the "be bold" directive in the current wording of T:BOUND and just sort of have as an operating procedure that if there's an explicit policy being violated (rather than just upholding the status quo of the page) one extra revert is fine. idk. It's just a weird small contradiction between two policies. Najawin ☎ 03:38, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
Discussion
I think it's safe to say that this idea never had any legs aside from my interest. If an admin wishes to close it, (ideally without prejudice) I have no objection. Najawin ☎ 04:52, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
- Dunno how I missed this thread for seven months!
- I agree with the proposal about changing the wording. Not sure how, but the points are reasonable and action should be considered. 09:56, 31 July 2024 (UTC)