Wikipedia:Using the balanced editing restriction
 | This is an essay on the balanced editing restriction and conduct policies. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
The balanced editing restriction is designed to discourage single-purpose accounts at articles which fall within ARBPIA5 by requiring editors to make no more than 1/3 of their edits in the article, article talk, draft, and draft talk spaces included in that topic in any given 30-day period. An edit made in violation is considered a topic-ban violation.
Tracking
[edit]Filter 1,339 tracks all edits in the four qualifying namespaces that fall under the BER. The filter looks for article talk pages and draft talk pages that are in Category:Wikipedia pages subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and extendedconfirmed-protected articles and drafts whose talk pages are in that category. Unlike most restrictions, the BER is defined in strict technical terms: If an edit trips Filter 1,339, it counts toward the BER numerator; and if it does not trip it, it does not count.
The easiest way to see whether an editor is below the BER threshold is by running their username through toolforge:n-ninety-five with the default settings. This will tell you what percentage of their edits in the four qualifying namespaces, in the last 30 days, have hit Filter 1,339. Keep in mind that, if it has not been 30 days since the BER was imposed, the user cannot be in violation.
Manually checking
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Manually getting the numerator is easy: Go to the filter hit log for 1,339, add the username, and set the "after" date to 30 days in the past. Count hits, going backward through pages if necessary. Getting the denominator is a bit more complicated:
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Requirements and considerations for administrators
[edit]The restriction can be placed by an individual administrator or by rough consensus at AE. Restrictions must be logged at Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log.
The editor can be alerted with {{balanced editing restriction notes}}. Note the option to send appeals only to ARCA. An appeal that an administrator believes should not go to AN must be specified as going only to ARCA; one cannot specify only AE.
Those assessing an editor's contributions should note that a restricted user effectively cannot violate the restriction until at least 30 days after the sanction has been imposed.
There are a handful of edge cases, most notably cross-namespace moves, that could lead to N95 or a manual count falsely reporting a violation.[a] Per ArbCom, admins are not required to check for these edge cases before blocking,[b] but use common sense: If the number you get seems implausible, look deeper.[c] And if a user blocked for a violation is able to show that such an edge case occurred, they should of course be unblocked.
Technical limitations
[edit]For technical reasons, the balanced editing restriction requires the editor being topic-banned from discussing PIA except within article, article talk, draft, draft talk, and their own user and user talk spaces. This means they won't be able to participate in PIA-related discussions in Wikipedia space, such as at noticeboards or AfD.
Also for technical reasons, the restriction considers the number of edits, not the amount of added text. This is a feature rather than a bug, as while either type of measure could be gamed, in theory gaming to create multiple small edits could encourage small positive contributions, while gaming to add text would tend to encourage padding and discourage removal of unuseful content.
Usage in other areas
[edit]A rough consensus of admins at WP:AE or a community consensus at WP:AN or WP:ANI has the authority to impose a BER in some other topic area, but the technical implementation may be quite complicated depending on the topic area.[d]
Notes
[edit]- ^ Other potential edge cases include issues involving suppression, legitimate use of multiple accounts, and edits being disallowed by some other edit filter and thus a hit being logged even though there was no edit.
- ^ Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment/Archive 131 § Clarification request: Palestine-Israel articles 5 (balanced editing restriction)
- ^ To check for cross-namespace moves, you can do a manual check (as described above) of a user's contributions and deleted contributions to subpages in userspace and usertalkspace (the only other place that an article or draft has any real likelihood of being moved to) and check the history of each.
- ^ See comment by Barkeep49 and comment by Tamzin.