Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-21/Discussion report

Policy Report
Several contributors shared their thoughts with the Signpost about our policy on Edit warring. A separate page covering the three-revert rule was merged into this policy last summer after a long discussion. FT2 thinks that the merge was overdue, to "ensure that the principle of edit warring took precedence over the one example where a hard line's drawn." Because we're a collaborative community, FT2 would like to see more attention paid to this policy, and to "killing edit warring - and the poor quality but difficult-to-action behaviors like provocation, bad faith, unfounded claims, personal attacks, needling, tendentiousness, stonewalling, fillibustering, team tagging, that are used in edit wars." HereToHelp supported the merge, to shift the focus: "An inflexible ... policy (3RR) does not facilitate understanding ... Rather, it causes both sides to store their aggression and feel mistreated." He adds that page protection is often a better strategy. On the other side of the argument, IronDuke not only opposes the merge but would support a reversion. He has little confidence that admins will ferret out "a half dozen complex edits mixed in with straight reversions", and feels that our edit-warring policy stacks the deck against good-faith editors.

Starting next week, the Policy Report will take a break from the conduct policies and begin to look at the content policies, including our core content policies: Neutral point of view, No original research and Verifiability. Comments are welcome at the discussion of our page covering Biographies of living persons.