[WikiEN-l] More thoughts on the 3-revert rule

[Bill Konrad]

I was blocked yesterday for violating the 3RR. I don't fault Geni for doing 
this, as it was within the letter of the 3RR. However, I have questions 
about what the intent of the rule is. Is the rule intended as punishment of 
any technical violation of 3RR, even where the conflict causing the reverts 
has been resolved? Or is it supposed to be a mechanism for putting an end 
(or at least a cease-fire) to active edit wars?

Here's the short version, from my perspective. Some users figured out a way 
to use templates to produce a table of contents for categories. At Wikipedia 
talk:Categorization, this was generally seen as a very good thing for 
navigating large categories (and indeed may minimize some of the rationale 
for creating certain types of sub-categories merely to reduce the size of 
the parent category). Netoholic took it upon himself to "improve" the 
templates without much in the way of explanation about what he was doing. I 
reverted his changes as he seemed to be the only person who saw any problem 
and and a few other persons also questioned the changes he was attempting to 
impose. It was only after a few set of reversions that it finally came out 
that there are dramatic difference in the way that IE and Firefox display 
the templates. After understanding just how dramatic the differences are, I 
withdrew my objections to Netoholic's change. This was at 19:58, Feb 11, 
2005. The last reversion I made was at 15:45, Feb 11, 2005.

However, before this, at 16:17, Feb 11, 2005, Netoholic had filed a 
complaint about me on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR. I don't 
dispute that I reverted four times to the same version (while Netoholic 
reverted twice on two separate times to somewhat different versions). Since 
I generally avoid making multiple reversions, I simply was not paying that 
close attention to the revert rule and the timing of my reverts -- I was 
reacting to what appeared to be Netoholic unilaterally imposing changes, 
without adequately explaining the rationale and despite questions and 
opposition to his changes. Basically, it looked as though Netoholic was the 
only person who saw a problem with the templates and was not especially 
effective in explaining what he saw as the problem. I and others saw 
Netoholic's changes as clearly inferior (and indeed the second set of 
changes made the template nearly unusable in Firefox), so I do not feel any 
compunction about reverting these changes. Once it became clear just how 
dramatic the differences between IE and Firefox were, I agreed that one of 
Netoholic's earlier versions was the best choice as being least problematic 
in both browsers. So that was the end of the reversions. No more edit war.

However, the block was not imposed until 02:23, 12 Feb 2005, some several 
hours after the end of any disagreement between me and Netoholic.

So to my mind, this raises some questions -- Should the current state of the 
"edit war" be taken into account when imposing a block for violation of 3RR? 
If whatever dispute was at the root of the reversion has been resolved, does 
it make sense to impose a block as punishment for earlier violations (and 
especially as this was not a case of a repeat edit warrior who perhaps might 
need a slap on the hands as a reminder)? I mean, I certainly don't see 
myself as an edit warrior, and I'd be very surprised if anyone else saw me 
as such.

Bkonrad