Wikipedia talk:Edit warring/Archives/2013/December

reverting because another editor violated 3rr
May an editor make a revert because the revert prior violated 3rr (or 1rr) if by making the revert the editor has now also violated 3rr. See this revert for context. Thanks.-- brew crewer  (yada, yada) 19:50, 25 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Brewcrewer is WP:Stalking me as can be proven by his contributions these last 20 days. His contributions are not constructive and he is clearly not here to develop and encyclopedia (WP:NOTHERE).
 * There is an ongoing discussion on a talk page an there is no reason why 'he' should not be tied to respect the other contributors and the collaboration process on wikipedia. Pluto2012 (talk) 19:55, 25 December 2013 (UTC)


 * No, the proper course of action is to report the user who supposedly violated policy to the appropriate forum. I'm not expressing any opinion on the merits of the edits in question, just answering the question from an abstract policy standpoint.--Bbb23 (talk) 19:58, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
 * @ Bbb23Thanks.-- brew crewer  (yada, yada) 20:30, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
 * @ Pluto2012 I invite you to self revert your 1RR violation, per above.-- brew crewer  (yada, yada) 20:30, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I didn't violate 1RR nor 3RR.
 * Your WP:Civil POV pushing will not influence me. You are one of these contributors who generate a WP:battleground climate on wikipedia and I will make you banned. I just need some time to fill the appropriate requests.
 * In the meantime, you are welcome on the talk page where the ground of the topic is discussed.
 * Pluto2012 (talk) 20:49, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

"Customer's view" on revert wars
Please take into the consideration another aspect of fast-paced "partial revert" war. Even when done with best intentions and without any hostility, rapid switching back and forth confuses the reader mightily. It is tempting to take wikipedian's goal "to create encyclopedia" to an extreme: "...and to the hell with the readers", but the ultimate goal is to disseminate free information, which is impossible without readers to digest it. :-)

Therefore I would not come hard onto an admin who tries to break the "oscillations" in the mainspace. Instead, I would suggest to add an instruction for the admin in the cases when there is no evidence of malice or clean-cut clicks of the "undo" button 90 seconds apart. The admin, a supposedly smarter and more level-headed person, is advised to go into the article talk page and tell the opposing parties something to the end that their activities strongly resemble a revert war and to suggest them to hammer out an improved (not necessarily final) version in the talk page first (just was we do with the policies) and then post it. (Of course, if there is no compromise, then it is an edit war without question).

In any case, IMO the "Admin guidance" section must say something that admin's job is not only to enforce a policy, but also talk sense to people, who are quite possibly not vicious edit warriors, but simply lost perspective due to sleep deprivation and other consequences of wikiholism. Staszek Lem (talk) 21:28, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Reverting socks
The #3 3RR exemption says that one is exempted from 3RR if a sock of a banned/blocked editor is reverted. What about sock of an editor who is not blocked? Isn't it easy for one side to escalate the edit war by reverting while logged out? -- S M S   Talk 23:19, December 26, 2013 (UTC)
 * If they are indeed a sock then they'll likely be blocked in the near future provided an SPI is in progress. At that point you're probably best off waiting until the block goes through to ensure you keep the high ground. At least, that's my advice. DonIago (talk) 13:28, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Protecting articles against socks is difficult, because they happily exploit asymmetry; legitimate editors have rules to follow, whilst socks can do what they want (until blocked), quickly and with minimal constraint. Although an SPI is good practice, making an SPI mandatory before reverting a sock would worsen the asymmetry. If there is a good reason to believe that the account (or IP) is a sock - a reason that stands up to independent scrutiny if somebody else does ask - that's good enough for me. Furthermore, SPI is overworked at the best of times - filling their intray with lots of trivial formal requests, just so another editor is officially permitted to repair damage done by an obvious sock, seems unhelpful to me. bobrayner (talk) 21:13, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Not disagreeing with any of what you've said, but if they are a sock, then shouldn't an SPI be filed regardless? DonIago (talk) 21:19, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The case I came around was that the admin only blocked the IP sock leaving the master account unblocked. -- S M S   Talk 21:51, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Donlago: I had other flavours of sockpuppetry in mind:
 * Where a prolific sockmaster creates lots of different throwaway socks - so there is a prior SPI on that sockmaster, but creating a new entry for each new account before fixing its problems may be unnecessary bureaucracy;
 * Where an account is obviously a sock but the identity of the sockmaster isn't certain - this tends to happen on topics where there are multiple editors on either side of a long-term dispute; often the kind of dispute which keeps Arbcom busy. If you don't know who the sockmaster is, it's impractical to file an SPI - accounts like that sometimes get blocked after a thread on AN/I or some other drama-board.
 * More generally, blatant socks, where there is simply no need for formal investigation, and some admin has already blocked the sock and moved on.
 * You do make a good point though. As a general principle I would agree that it's good to have an SPI. bobrayner (talk) 22:13, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification! DonIago (talk) 13:26, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
 * If you look through SPI archives, you'll probably find quite a few unconfirmed SP suspicions. Please keep in mind that it is just as easy for a "drive-by" editor to think "yeah, Alice is right and Bob is wrong" and click "undo" as kind of lazy vote. Besides, 3RR is not the worst trouble with socks. Therefore I don't think there is any better solution than to follow the wikipedia rules of conflict resolution without excessive " witch sock hunt". Staszek Lem (talk) 21:45, 31 December 2013 (UTC)