Wikipedia talk:PC2012/WaitingForConnection

Initial thoughts

? —WFC— 20:10, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

What in heaven's name are "illegal additions"? The only thing I can think of is edits which would break the law in either (a) the locale of the hosting entity (i.e., Florida) or (b) an edit containing information that may not be published in accordance with the law of the locale from which the editor has made the edit (e.g., naming of a person in contravention of a publication ban). Risker (talk) 23:14, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Copyright violations perhaps? ~Adjwilley (talk) 23:59, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Nope. Our policy exceeds the requirements of law by several orders of magnitude. Short of adding almost an entire work without referencing its source, only a trial would determine whether or not something was a copyright violation. Risker (talk) 00:10, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for picking up on that. I've changed it accordingly, what I was really concerned about was egregious or persistent BLP violations. Talking in terms of policy and real-world impact rather than legalities is probably the best way to go. —WFC— 22:06, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

I like your ideas for standards for removal of the reviewer right and sanctions for those who do so improperly. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:59, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

edit warring

I don't believe PC should ever be used to stop edit warring, full protection and/or blocking the involved parties should probably continue to be the standard approach. Otherwise it could be seen as deliberately giving registered users the upper hand in content disputes. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:54, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

You could use PC level 2 if none of the edit warriors are reviewers... although then if an unsuspecting reviewer approves some changes he/she may be seen as taking sides when the intention was just to register the fact that the edit contains no vandalism. You could put rules in to mitigate against this... but it might be easier to just say "not for edit warring". Yaris678 (talk) 08:05, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

If there is consensus that we should have an explicit "PC must not be used for..." list, I'd be happy for edit wars to go on it. I hope that there is, but my instinct is that the community would want us to stop just a little bit short of that. —WFC— 20:46, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

I was actually thinking the opposite: that PC would be a handy tool to use where there is edit warring going on, and would sometimes be a less ham-fisted solution than simply protecting the WP:WRONG version of the article.

To play devil's advocate against the view that PC would give one group of users the upper hand, consider the following scenarios: If it's PC1 and the warring is between two users, PC won't do anything, obviously. If it's between an IP and a user, the user won't get the upper hand, because if there are pending changes, none of the edits will "go live" until they've been reviewed. Plus there's the added benefit that the pending changes will automatically attract a third party (the reviewer) to the dispute. Meanwhile, while the IP and user are reverting back and forth, the article itself remains stable. You can still report both users for 3RR violations, but there's less collateral damage overall. The only problem would be if it were the user who made the first edit, and the IP who reverted. This would be a rare case, but a discerning reviewer should still be able to sort it out. In the third case, if there are two IPs edit warring, neither will have an advantage, and again, PC will automatically attract an experienced editor to review the edit war.

The main problem I do see would be if one of the warring parties was a reviewer, and they were marking their own edits as auto-reviewed. This would be an abuse of power, and the reviewer should have their rights revoked, assuming they weren't reverting blatant vandalism. ~Adjwilley (talk) 22:03, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

You're assuming the user (IP v. user) is not a reviewer (in which case this falls flat on its face since the reviewer can just reject edits from whoever he's bickering with <vitriol removed>). You're also assuming (IP v. IP) that the reviewer doesn't agree with either side, and lastly (in any case) that reviewers are robots devoid of human nature, as opposed to humans. It's basic psychology - people are only going to approve edits that fit their weltanschauung. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 02:22, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Good to see you Jeremy. Thanks for reversing your "I will never help PC" stance: your decision to now help contribute to the improvement of this part of Wikipedia is noted and warmly welcomed.

Unfortunately, your argument is wholly dependent on the assumption that all reviewers will act with bias, and that they will be allowed to get away with this indefinitely. That assumption would only be valid if you could prove that the process for holding reviewers to account is not fit for purpose, and that there is no reasonable hope of editing it so that it does. Administrators can delete any article that they see fit, crats can rename any user they want with the most egregious name imaginable and so on, but this almost never happens because we have workable ways of dealing with them.

There are of course subjective cases where it is difficult to take action against these usergroups, but I'm not convinced that there are similar grey areas with reviewers. No opponent of PC is in a position to claim that a biased user accepting edits is a problem, on the basis that they are arguing that all edits should be accepted immediately and unconditionally (as is the case without PC). So as long as we accept that a principle along the lines of WP:INVOLVED applies to declining edits, a reviewer acting in a way consistent with their POV would be a blatant breach of the reviewer policy: any recurrance or evidence of a pattern whatsoever should result in removal of the right. —WFC— 03:30, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm not helping it so much as I'm helping you not fuck up. it'd just be a crying shame if the process you lied, cheated, and swindled so hard to get forced on en.wp were to be removed because of elementary human behaviour. I've been making arguments to that extent since the first discussion I participated in, and this is the first time anyone's bothered to try and rebut it, given that systemic bias is a serious concern. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 03:38, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

"lied, cheated, and swindled": crossing a line, Jeremy, be cool. - Dank (push to talk) 03:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

They lied to us about the trial length (tried to make it indefinite), three of the four RfCs/discussions were plainly weighted towards pro-PC, and the close of the last RfC couldn't be a less blatant swindle if Bernie Madoff closed the shit. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 04:11, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

"They" may have "lied, cheated, and swindled" (and that's a legitimate if in my opinion misguided view to hold), but I certainly didn't. I assume it was simply a poor choice of words, which you will clarify at the very next opportunity. —WFC— 04:16, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree, WFC ... OTOH, Jeremy brings up a good point, if we've told reviewers that they should "use their judgment" and reject any edit that doesn't seem to "follow policy" on a PC-protected page. People have a tendency to believe that edits that they disagree with "don't follow policy". Sure, we could remove the reviewer right if reviewers make this mistake, but it's a common mistake, and I think we'd be setting them up for failure. I think the criteria for what to reject should be simple and narrow. - Dank (push to talk) 04:00, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

You can make it as simple and narrow as you please. They'll just alter their rejection justification to fit whatever criteria you come up with, especially if the area is a naturally contentious one (ethnopolitical conflicts, fringe sciences, etc.). You can't fix human nature. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 03:44, 26 July 2012 (UTC)