User:WereSpielChequers/Edit Warring

This is a draft proposal to make two changes to the way we deal with edit warring.

Protect V named editors

Currently we go through four levels of warnings before we block vandals, but edit warrers can be blocked on their first offense. This makes little sense, especially as we almost never turn vandals into productive editors (though some grow up and come back as teenagers), but edit warring is almost by definition an offense committed by otherwise goodfaith editors. One reason given for blocking edit warrers is that we don't have the elaborate infrastructure in place to spot edit warring that we have for spotting vandalism, once a vandal is given a level 1 warning their subsequent edits are highlighted to recent changes patrollers using Huggle or Stiki; But if an admin comes across edit warring they have to deal with it, ignore it, or warn and then watch to see if the warning works.

As an alternative or precursor to the current 24 hour block for edit warring, there would be a modified article protection that would protect a page from being edited by a named account or accounts. So an admin who encounters edit warring would be able to stop the edit warrers from editing the page they were edit warring on, but leave them unrestricted either to seek consensus on the talkpage or to edit elsewhere.

This would require a change to mediawiki, but the WMF has lots of programmers nowadays and they have said that making the site less bitey and aggressive is a priority for them.

In terms of policy, admins would be empowered to protect particular pages against particular editors in circumstances where they would otherwise be entitled to block those editors for edit warring.

In terms of logging, this would obviously generate an entry in protection logs, but one question to consider is whether we want to record these in users blocklogs or elsewhere?

Substantial Protect

Arbcom has introduced the requirement for a new level of protection between Semi and Full protection. By limiting articles in certain areas such as Israel/Palestine to only be edited by registered accounts that are thirty days old and have 500 edits, Arbcom has created the need for a 500/30 level of protection, hereby called substantial Protection as this would be somewhere between semi and full protection.

As Arbcom has decreed that accounts with fewer edits/tenure can't edit such articles it makes sense to introduce a level of protection that enables such restrictions. Otherwise newish editors could inadvertently edit articles they shouldn't, and get reverted for potentially goodfaith edits.

Substantial Protection would work similarly to existing levels of protection, and admins could introduce it either on articles covered by the appropriate Arbcom sanction, or on articles that under current policy merited full protection. So this proposal could open up some admin only articles to a wider group of editors.