User:Passionless/DIF

What constitutes a revert is an important question which has yet to be clearly defined on wikipedia, leading to problems for both editors who might be unknowning breaking RR, and for admins who must decide whether or not RR has been broken.

Below I will go through many examples of edits, and whether they count as a revert(and how many) or not.

Pending changes
The question about edit #5 is, is re-adding material similar to previously rejected material, but being clearly significantly improved for the reason it was reverted, count as a revert? Edits #4 and 6 question whether or not accepting previously rejected material counts as a revert because that material has already been reverted by an editor. I believe that accepting material identical to that previously rejected is a revert, while edit #6 should only be a revert if edit #5 is a revert.

Determining number of reverts
Table above in text: Some editors will go through disastrous articles one section at a time instead of making one large edit to reduce complexity and reduce the chance of an edit conflict occuring. If an editor deletes three parts from three sections within 10 minutes with no intermediate edits, these three reverts can be classified as 1 total revert. What if between these three reverts another editor fixes the grammar of a section not touched by the original editor. The edits are no longer purely sequential, does this mean the edits can still be counted as 1 total revert, or will they now be counted seperately as 2 or 3 total reverts occuring? I think that minor edits in unrelated sections should have no effect on the sequentiality of a group of reverts, but currently only some admins would agree with me while many others would disagree, making this a clearly an area which needs clarification and standardization.

The effect of time
Two questions, first, does the amount of time between consecutive edits matter when deciding whether to count as one edit or multiple, and if so at what point, over 10minutes, over 1 hour, etc. Second does time matter in the case of the making an edit which was reverted over a year ago, over 50 edits have occured since, and there is no evidence the new editor had knowledge of this far gone edit. And yes, the second part does come up, one day I reverted a brand new edit on a 1RR page and decided to make another edit, than while reading through the history I did notice an edit equal and opposite of my own about 75 edits and 6 months back, so I self-reverted to avoid breaking 1RR.

Squables over related words
Again, time may be of significance, namely the time difference between edits 1 and 2. If edit #2 happens to be years after edit #1 as opposed to immediately proceeding edit #1 people may perceive the edit differently.

Exceptions
Edits which fully undo another editors are not counted as reverts when they are undoing obvious vandalism, removing information which violates WP:BLP, and in undoing the edits made by a banned (not blocked but banned) user.