SmashWiki talk:Only revert once

Directly conflicts with 3RR. Guideline, or essay, certainly. But policy, it shan't be. --Sky (t · c · w) 03:52, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

The premise behind 3RR is less apt at covering what it was intended to do, and contains gigantic technicalities with a high possibility of potential abuse. With 3RR, I am not permitted to revert any amount of edits on Falcon Knee more than 3 times a day. What happens if 9001 users come and add a dumb/pointless note to the page? Will you ban me for removing bad information? Policy says so. (Don't argue that discretion wins, because even though it does, one should generally try to avoid flat out ignoring policy even though their cause is just. Usually it is excusable, and this would be one of those times, but that doesn't really matter- adopting better policies > ignoring bad ones.)

1RV is better suited to handling mass-reverts. Rather than creating an arbitrary "don't revert more than this" line that does not take into account the content under dispute (excepting vandalism), 1RV revolves upon the content under scrutiny, which specifically prevents edit wars. It also requires discussion, which is preferable in almost all cases where there is conflict. 1RV is more suitable to it's purpose, and therefore would benefit the wiki better than 3RR. --Shadowcrest 00:46, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, let me see. Your first example blatantly fails. That's quite distinctly what 3RR does not say; your example easily falls under "Reverting basic vandalism". I.e. Discretion wins. Simple as that. Your line is as arbitrary as 3RR is. Besides, 1RV fails (gracefully) on a wiki this size, where administrators can take care of any potential abusers much quickly and with less bureaucracy than in other places. --Sky (t · c · w) 00:55, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Do you truly believe that people with good intentions adding notes that should be removed anyway is equivalent to vandalism? If so, lrn2wiki again. If someone adds a note on Knee Smash that it's strong finisher: Is their note made in good faith? Yes. Is the information true? Yes. Is it vandalism? No. Should it be removed anyway for other reasons, such as redundancy? Yeah. Does 3RR stop me from reverting not just this pointless note but additionally ∞-2 pointless notes added within 24h? Yeah. Will it happen? Maybe not. Can you prove it won't? No.

...that's quite explicitly what it says. The only things exempt from 3rr are "reverting your own changes, fixing simple vandalism, removing posts made by a banned or blocked user"; as noted above, bad notes/trivia/etc != vandalism.

"Discretion wins." I said that. But that isn't an argument for 3rr/ against 1RV; it's basically a statement of fact. If you're going to argue that we can/do/should ignore the rules set up simply because they're unneeded due to discretion, why bother creating the policy pages at all? Sounds like some unnecessary bureaucracy to me, hm?

You said that stuff about this wiki being too small/having too many admins before; I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now. If a vandal can go on vandalizing for 2 hours during the afternoon without getting a ban, then there's something not going right. Additionally, how does "dealing with potential abusers faster" apply? --Shadowcrest 01:28, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

If they can't figure it out that it's not welcome by the third time, than this "policy" is just a weapon against you and not them. By 3rr, bad notes == vandalism.
Yeah, it is unnecessary bureaucracy. Before SmashWiki became part of Wikia, there were no such pages. People got along peachily, blocks/bans got handed out when necessary, and life was good. However, the rules are just as much to protect the people as to protect the wiki.
This point of too small/having too many admins is a tangent that you're going on here, and perhaps more than anything you are misunderstanding. It was a point that with 5-6 active administrators, there is no bureaucracy on the totem pole. Simply compare all the people you have to deal with on Wikipedia when you need to deal with the administrative side. This is what I meant by small wiki in this case. For a tendentious editor, all that has to happen is that someone needs to poke an administrator to come deal with it, whatever he might need to do. --Sky (t · c · w) 02:57, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Then 3rr is doin it rong. If 9001 people add 9001 stupid but entirely unrelated notes to a page, then how are they supposed to figure out their note is going to be unwelcome when it's unrelated to the others and they believe it is a valid note?

Happens the same now, zzz, less QQ more pew pew etc

ok. I still missed the point of the tangent. --Shadowcrest 15:53, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

useless convos

We have a revert policy already. (holds up a shotgun) Hasta la vista, baby. (blasts the hell out of it, Terminator style.)Silvie (talk) 04:35, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

I hope I don't need to explain to you how completely unnecessary of a comment that was. Semicolon (talk) 04:35, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Demotion to guideline

To this date, 1RV is without a doubt the least followed and most problematic policy on the site, and for a good reason. The trouble is, even with the rather vague exceptions listed on this policy page, it is quite common for situations to arise in which following this policy is not necessarily the best course of action. This should never be the case with a good policy, and it is because of this that I propose that this policy be demoted to a guideline, similarly to how wikipedia handles this issue, with 1RV being merely a guideline, and staff enforcement of it only being carried out in the case of clear counter-productive edit warring, reminiscent of the 3 revert rule. Alex the Jigglypuff trainer 16:27, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Support This policy has caused problems for me on more than one occasion, namely that I've reverted edits that break this policy to remind people of the policy, which according to the policy, is a violation of the policy. Awesomelink234, the Super Cool Gamer Leave a message if needed 16:29, June 18, 2019 (EDT) Changing to oppose per SK and Flare. Awesomelink234, the Super Cool Gamer Leave a message if needed 20:23, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Neutral I say we either demote this to a guideline, or at least edit it to be more specific. I don't exactly think it's out of the question that we could simply do the latter. --MeatBall104 18:31, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Support: I’ve edit warred too many edit warrers. Lou Cena (talk) 19:35, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Absolutely not. I am not having people edit warring more because "this is not a policy anymore". The fact that this is the "least followed policy" means that we need to enforce it more, not throw it away. SerpentKing 20:11, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

No. Just straight up no. Per Serpent, you're basically encouraging edit warring. A move like this will only worsen the situation. Disaster Flare (talk) 20:14, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Oppose. Same as Serpent King and Disaster Flare, can only promote edit warring. Spexx (talk) 20:23, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Oppose. You should've advocated for a revision of the policy if you think it's flawed, instead of trying to axe it altogether. If you have problems with a policy, you can ask the admins to look it over and see if something about it could be fixed. Hinata (talk) 20:30, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

In true midwestern fashion, yea no. Parroting SK, this is easily the least followed policy (even I don't follow it all the time, I'll admit), but that doesn't mean we should bring it down. We don't need things to take up tons of space in the RC; otherwise, edits are impossible to keep track of, arguments become tedious to actually stop, and traffic goes through the roof. Aidan, the Rurouni 20:31, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Get outta here. Discussion closed. This would only make it harder to enforce correctly. Toomai Glittershine The Celeritous 20:39, June 18, 2019 (EDT)

Wow, ok so I just got home to find that this discussion appears to have exploded, and I think some people here, particularly the administrators, don't really seem to understand what I'm proposing here. I'm not proposing that we do away with edit warring altogether, I'm simply saying we should make our stance on it a bit more liberal. So first, let me clarify what I'm actually proposing here in the hopes that we can stop attacking strawmen.

1. Edit warring should not be treated like an if → then algorithm, as the issue is a bit more complicated than that. Simply stating that reverting another user's reversion is verboten clearly doesn't work, and it's more helpful to take things case-by-case, with administrators deciding what does and doesn't constitute an edit-war. This should not be controversial, as this is essentially already the case, despite technically not being in the spirit of this being a policy. Administrators already generally tend to treat the policy like this, presumably because they are aware that the issue is more nuanced that this policy makes it out to be, whether they support it being a policy or not.
2. Reverting more than once should be discouraged, but should not necessarily be assumed to be an edit war right away. For example, I've actually seen a fair few instances of one user reverting another user's revert, and leaving a clear edit summary explanation, after which the initial reverter understands why their reversion was erroneous. This process works considerably better that leaving a message on the article's talk page, especially since unlike Wikipedia we don't have a ping function on SmashWiki.
3. A 3 revert rule should be implemented, which will be a policy which functions similarly to the way the Wikipedia policy of the same name functions, although with the 24-hour rule omitted, as SmashWiki tends to work slower than Wikipedia does. This allows exceptions only for edits such as vandalism, blatantly false information and userspace editing. This will be treated as policy, as at this stage it becomes very clear that administrative intervention is required. Administrators can of course intervene earlier should they see it as necessary, but this will not always be necessary which is one of the reasons for this proposal.

I understand that I may not have been very clear before so I hope that this clears things up for some people. Now I would like to address some comments I am seeing.

Serpent King: 'I am not having people edit warring more because "this is not a policy anymore"'. To be clear, I am not suggesting that edit warring as a whole becomes a guideline, I am saying that the 1 revert rule is highly flawed and that reverting more than once is not always automatically an edit war. Edit warring is still "against the rules" as it were, but a more human approach needs to be taken towards it due to 1RV clearly not working as intended.

Hinata: 'You should've advocated for a revision of the policy if you think it's flawed, instead of trying to axe it altogether'. That is precisely what I am trying to do. I'm proposing that a 3 revert rule would work better as the hard policy, with the 1 revert rule being a guideline.

Toomai: 'This would only make it harder to enforce correctly' & Aidanzapunk: ' [addressing why 1RV should remain a policy] edits are impossible to keep track of, arguments become tedious to actually stop, and traffic goes through the roof'. I think that there's good reason to believe that this would not cause the problems that some people are concerned it will cause. At the risk of people bombarding me with SW:NOT comments, I think Wikipedia serves as evidence that this kind of approach to dealing with edit wars works just fine. Despite Wikipedia being considerably busier than SmashWiki is, the admins don't appear to be having much trouble dealing with edit wars when they come up. With how much easier it will be to spot edit wars on SmashWiki due to recent changes being much easier to use here, I see no reason to believe that there will be much issue with this.

And that's about what I have to say. I request for this discussion to be reopened, with the clarifications I have made above. Alex the Jigglypuff trainer 06:32, June 19, 2019 (EDT)