Wikipedia talk:Using the balanced editing restriction

Drafting new essay

Since this is brand new and feels quite different from anything we've used, I was a little stumped over what all I needed to do and consider. I'd love to have input from anyone who has given this more thought. Pinging Tamzin, Rosguill and Barkeep49, who IIRC have discussed this a bit at AE. Valereee (talk) 14:39, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As I noted in my comment at AE, I could theoretically see this being an appropriate sanction in cases that fall just shy of tban level and where a warning is insufficient, but I have yet to actually come across such a situation in practice. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 15:16, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think we've seen some of those in the past - maybe 2 or 3 cases out of the ~80 PIA cases from last year. I think it would also be possible for AE to impose this in other topic areas, though some work would have to be done around setup/enforcement. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:40, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

potential for gaming

See discussions here and here which show how easily this is gamed. Perhaps a request for clarification or amendment at WP:ARCA is a good idea? TarnishedPath^talk 02:31, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please assume good faith. Following the rules is not “gaming the system”, and minor edits/copy edits are both necessary and useful. Drsmoo (talk) 14:11, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I dealt with the possibility of gaming in the essay. If you think a request for clarification would help, by all means open one! Valereee (talk) 14:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Using this outside of Israel / Palestine

At a recent AN/I thread I suggested we could consider an edit restriction like this for a newer editor at an AN/I thread where a topic ban seemed overkill but where there was a sense a remedy beyond a warning was likely needed. This is in a contentious topic (Russia / Ukraine). There were, however, some quite fair questions regarding whether the technical basis existed to apply this to edits within a different CTOP from Israel / Palestine. Specifically the following questions were asked that I do not know the answers to:

does an edit filter currently exist to implement this outside the Arab-Israeli conflict topic area?
Are editors expected to count the number of edits they make per month, and the number of edits within the affected topic area, in order to comply with the restriction?

Is there anyone here with technical knowledge of this remediation who could assist? Simonm223 (talk) 14:40, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So:

Technically speaking, a BER can in theory be applied relative to any edit filter and any set of namespaces. However, there's not many filters that would be meaningful to measure against. Someone could create one for some other topic area, but there would be the challenge of tagging all the pages for the filter to log. In the case of ARBPIA, we hack together something based on protection level and the presence of the CTOP banner on the talkpage, but that wouldn't work in most other topic areas.
There is also the possibility of imposing a BER on someone without filter-based implementation, but that would be very hard to implement unless you picked a much lower number and a small set of pages, e.g. "No more than 5 of your last 100 mainspace edits may ever be to articles X, Y, or Z".
Editors are expected to keep track of their compliance. This page gives instructions on monitoring either with N95 or manually. I'd say that, in theory, counting manually is the only way to be certain of compliance; but in practice, in the event that someone were tracking with N95 but some idiot made a coding error and it gave the wrong result, I imagine we would accept that as mitigation for a resulting violation.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 17:21, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Simonm223 (talk) 17:22, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]