Require users that plan to edit flood over a certain rate / amount to get permission

Question

TL;DR: Users shouldn't flood edits without a consensus. Read my post but skip the optional stuff... :)

Every now and then, we get an edit flood at our front page. This sometimes happens without any consensus and sometimes even at unacceptable moments / rates. Which is why I think we should get a better coordination on this when such edit floods want to take place.

I've frequently done took part of this myself, my main intent is that I want it to happen but that shouldn't cause one to act by himself. If we get this better organized we act more together as a community...

I don't to see users banned for a full week just because of a misunderstanding, that scares them away!

Main Idea: We should require users to get permission from a moderator.

Q: I want to perform these changes to the site, may I perform an edit flood?

Three options:

♦ agrees: As there has been a consensus on this, you are free to go.

♦ delays: Not at this point, it's [peak moment in day] right now. You can do it later.

♦ denies: We have not reached a consensus on this, you are not allowed.

Additionally, a moderator can give this permission when a meta question wraps around:

♦ makes a meta question OR adds a comment to a post explaining a consensus has been reached.

Optional: We could gather these edit floods to do edit flood X times a year instead.

Yes, it doesn't seem a bad idea for a moderator to collect the things that seem necessary to be done and then we try to get this through as fast as possible. Instead of doing these multiple days, we just do these X times a year such that the rest of the time there are no edit floods on the front page.

It's fairly easy to do this:

1. Create a chat room where we organize this, assign each person a different topic to edit such that edits do not collide with one another. This makes an edit on one topic actually go faster.

2. Get everyone to open as much tabs as possible on the topic he needs to edit and prepare the edits along, you could like for example set up X minutes to do this. Then afterwards people literally flood the site which requests while still trying to avoid the captcha / IIS request limit, we don't want to take Super User litterally down in the progress.

3. The infrequent visitor sees a flood at that moment which resolves soon after, instead of our visitors seeing unfortunate edit floods at more frequent intervals.

Optional: The SE system could be foreseen from an edit rate limit, which shows a warning.

That warning could explain that one should raise the required editing on meta such that it can be added to the above organized edit floods, of course the rate should be disable by moderators such that we can have the above edit floods when we really need them. The rate limit idea is by nhinkle

The only thing left to do is, discussing these idea and filling in the X...

Main questions:

• What are your thoughts about this?

• What do you think is an acceptable limit on rate of edits, as in X edits per Y minutes?

• Do you have any other ideas / contributions to the edit floods topic?

Optional questions:

• Supposing that it is a good idea, how many times a year should we organize an edit flood?

• What should the warning towards an edit flooding user say, if it gets implemneted?

Related:
Do we care about edit flooding? Should we be doing anything?
Why are there large number of high-view questions on the front page?
What time of the day is Super User getting the least traffic?
Recent edit floods, some of them which confuse / upset people or happened without consensus.

Answer 1

TL;DR

I think this is an interesting idea, but causes more harm then good.

Long version

Just my two cents, but I think that there is really only one type of edit flood that you are trying to address, namely deliberate "mechanical" editing where the user knows that they will be processing a lot of edits in a short period (like out recent edit flood with the now aptly named user URGE TO RETAG.

As Simon says, and some of the posts that you linked to demonstrate amply, most edit flooding is good edits that occur when a user is going through \review, or something similar.

Another important thing to consider with this type of moderator approval required to edit, is that it is only effective if all the other ways of bumping a question to the front page are also disabled. To my knowledge, this means not just no editing, but no answering.

Yet another important fact to consider is that even if this raises a flag or something like that for mod attention, it might not get dealt with for an hour. While generally this is not a concern (and in many cases it is less) to a user that is in the middle of going through \review it just stops them cold. And they don't know when they can continue. This seems like it will have a chilling impact on the heavy use of \review.

Even if we coordinate edit flooding, and thus avoid it being a problem to the average user at the average moment, it still leaves the issue of the edits not really getting "reviewed." This is the reason that there is no minor edit flag. In theory, someone could edit a post during that time to be something offensive, and no-one would catch it for a long time, buried as it was under all the other edits.

It is my understanding that most things that will cause edit flooding that can be known in advance should be taken up on meta, and a mod/dev deals with it (like a mass retag, burning a tag, etc). These issues should never be done by a user on their own in any case, and so the proposed collaboration will not be helpful.

For your second question, I think that if something like you idea is implemented (and I am not for it to be honest) the rate should not be a fixed number / minutes, but rather having more than N on the front page at a time. Allows for faster reset on an incremental basis, and accounts for heavy traffic periods that way.

As to your third question: I don't think its really a problem when flooding occurs with "good edits" It is the same as it is the same as Community bumping old questions, except faster. It may cause some very temporary issues, but overall, not exactly what I would call harmful. It is only really a problem when someone goes ahead and makes loads of edits that are not useful.

Aside:

I think the optional part of your post has a lot of potential, but NOT as a remedy to limiting edit flooding. I think it would be great to clean up all the question in particular tags, all in one fell swoop, as it would make things like locating dupes much easier, would make things much easier to learn about, and would make the site much better in those areas. I think it would also encourage more people to edit. Seeing the editors for the past month shows a large divide between the 100+ edits this month, and the less than 100 edits this month, and I think that organizing edit drives, (if more people could get involved) would be great in reducing this divide, and getting more people involved in the community.

Answer 2

I believe we don't need additional measures.

We've had the occasional edit floods before (like with the re-uploading of images), but ever since then, we've been very cautious, and I guess the Meta community has developed a bit more sensible approach to mass-editing.

Whenever I call for editing of posts (like here, or here), I make sure to include a disclaimer. It'll inform users about not flooding the front page, but doing it in a coordinated fashion. This is what we agreed on earlier:

• Doing 10 posts or so at a time.
• Doing everything at once in low traffic hours (which would be 03:00 to 07:00 UTC).

… and it worked out pretty well so far.

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Recent events.

The only editing floods we've had since then were caused by a particular user who would literally take one comment like "I'd retag this manually", or an answer at a score of 2/0 – and suddenly go ahead and do everything.

I don't [want] to see users banned for a full week just because of a misunderstanding, that scares them away!

This wasn't just a misunderstanding. The user has been repeatedly told about taking their edit privileges more seriously, but was still performing pointless edits, even to a point where it's not funny anymore, and mass retags without community consensus.

Daniel more or less anticipated what would happen a few days before. It's not like this was a misunderstanding anymore.

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What we can do better:

To summarize, the way it currently is is totally fine. If it's obvious editing, like with the "Need Help" questions, then a Meta Question alone will suffice. Include a disclaimer, let people do their jobs.

I think we should just be more verbose when it comes to retag-requests. Maybe the Question/Answer approach is flawed here when the solution to retagging is not yet clear.

We should probably use the questions here for stating a problem, and then let the answers decide on how to best go about resolving the issue. Something like this:

Q: The tags X and Y are ambiguous, how do we change this?

A1: I'd go for creating Z and merging X into Z, keeping Y.

A2: It's fine to keep both, but retag only some.

Once we have a winner, and there is a lot to retag, then everyone is fine to retag, under the conditions we defined before (e.g. 10 at a time, only during low-traffic hours). We'll survive this.