Wikinews talk:Three revert rule

Use of groups

Davodd: One of my primary complaints at Wikipedia was watching a group organize their harrassment and stalking of a single user who insisted on adding unpopular but legitimate alternative viewpoints to religious articles. They organized reverts in IRC and on talk pages. This was blatantly against the spirit of the 3rr, but the response to this behavior was to include the phrase the 3RR specifically does not apply to groups.

I am opposed to this language, as it enforces a w:tyranny of the majority. - Amgine 03:09, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree that a majority doesn't equal a consensus and would like WN to avoid WP's weaknesses. As this was a C&P from wikipedia, I suggest you remove the offending phrases from the Wikinews version... and be bold in improving it for our purposes. -- Davodd | Talk 03:20, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

--I changed the part you objected to to read: "the 3RR may apply to small groups of two or three working in concert to harrass another person." Is that better? -- Davodd | Talk 11:36, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

<smile> Actually, I prefer to talk over changes before they are implemented, and you modified before I saw your response. Yes, that's a great improvement. Thanks! - Amgine 17:12, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I too think it's madness that this rule refers only to individuals. It should be that a page cannot be reverted to the same older state three times. Dan100 (Talk) 17:51, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well... what if a vandal or povior keeps changing an article, and multiple admins keep reverting to the original version? Then you could have a problem with both the "group" issue and the 3rr-to-old-version. I think a common-sense clause would be useful, but not sure how it would be worded. - Amgine 17:58, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Not to butt in, but why, in that case, don't you just warn/suspend/ban the vandal? Cafzal 18:02, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

In the case of obvious vandalism, that would be the preferred option. It might be less obvious if, for example, a group of contributors is going through all articles which refer to People's Republic of China and directing them to Mainland China or China or removing all references to Republic of China and replacing them with Taiwan. - Amgine 18:15, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Vague thoughts

IH once said that a big problem with protecting a page when you were involved in the dispute is that it tended to get locked in your version; and this got me thinking. Would it be a bad idea to count (revert) + (protect) as two reverts whenever it would usually count as one, i.e. its still zero reverts if your fighting vandalism. You probably also exempt tag restoration, as the existance of a dispute is reasonably obbjective & tag restoration is accordingly treated diffrently. Nyarlathotep 04:29, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Administrators in a content war/revert dispute should never protect a page. If the page actually requires protection (a user block is preferred), it should be protected by an uninvolved admin. --Chiacomo ^(talk) 04:31, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm aware of that, but it does occasionally happen anyway. (shrugs) Nyarlathotep 04:35, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Then we should talk very meanly to the offending editors, block them, if required, and if they make a habit of using protection as weapon in revert wars they should be drawn and quartered. --Chiacomo ^(talk) 04:36, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Ahh, so they have already committed a sin as bad or worse than violating the 3RR, makes sense. Nyarlathotep 04:46, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

<coughs> StrangerInParadise 00:59, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Posting revert history

One item which there was no consensus for on the Water cooler was a strict time limit. I'm removing that for the moment. - Amgine | ^{talk en.WN} 21:58, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Model of interaction

This policy is from the early stone age of Wikinews — the very early days when it had not yet become clear that news-production interactions have a different character than encyclopedia-production interactions. It applies to a level of coarse thrashing that basically shouldn't happen at all on Wikinews; the normal mode of operation on Wikinews is profoundly calmer than the mode of operation implied by 3RR. We've had fifteen years to learn that there's a better, calmer, more efficient way to function, and we have to start thinking about how to articulate it. --Pi zero (talk) 14:48, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever seen 3RR be an issue here on Wikinews.

Still, this page isn't doing any harm. It's basically "Hi, you're not allowed to do this thing that no one here really does anyway."

How about, for the time being, we add a line to the effect of "While revert wars are much rarer on Wikinews than on Wikipedia, they are still detrimental, and this rule is still in force"?

So what's our equivalent of 3RR? I see probably a completely separate page to the effect of "One thing that tends to prevent articles from reaching publication in time is active talk page discussions." Off the top of my head, two new guys did this:[1] They were constantly asking questions and suggesting further improvements and they didn't realize that the reviewers were not going to start doing their jobs until it looked like everyone wearing a drafting hat had finished. That's actually a rule around here somewhere. I think we can say that it's something that people coming from Wikipedia wouldn't know. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:42, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

There's no question of removing or weakening, this policy. I would not expect to edit it at all at this time. --Pi zero (talk) 16:03, 26 March 2019 (UTC)