Scratchpad:Three-revert rule

This page documents an official policy on Scratchpad. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that everyone should follow. Except for minor edits, please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy.

The following is official policy at Scratchpad.
Editors who engage in edit warring are liable to be blocked from editing to prevent further disruption. While any edit warring may lead to sanctions, there is a bright-line rule called the three-revert rule (3RR), the violation of which often leads to a block. The three-revert rule states:

A page means any page on Scratchpad, including talk and project space. A revert means any edit (or administrative action) that reverses the actions of other editors, in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material. A series of consecutively saved, reverted edits by one user with no intervening edits by another user counts as one revert.

The three-revert rule applies per person, not per account; reverts made by multiple accounts operated by one editor count together. Editors violating 3RR will usually be blocked for 24 hours for a first incident. Even without a 3RR violation, an Administrator may still act if they believe a user’s behavior constitutes edit warring, and any user may report edit warring with or without 3RR being breached. The rule is not an entitlement to revert a page a specific number of times.

If an editor violates 3RR by mistake, they should reverse their own most recent reversion. Administrators may take this into account and decide not to block in such cases — for example, if the user is not a habitual edit warrior and is genuinely trying to rectify their own mistake.

3RR exemptions

The following actions are not counted as reverts for the purposes of 3RR:

1. Reverting your own actions (“self-reverting”).
2. Reverting edits to pages in your own user space, so long as you are respecting the user page guidelines.
3. Reverting actions performed by banned users, and sockpuppets of banned and blocked users.
4. Reverting obvious vandalism — edits that any well-intentioned user would agree constitute vandalism, such as page blanking and adding offensive language.
5. Removal of clear copyright violations or content that unquestionably violates the non-free content policy (NFCC). What counts as exempt under NFCC can be controversial, and should be established as a violation first. Consider reporting to an Administrator instead of relying on this exemption.
6. Removal of other content that is clearly illegal under US law, such as child pornography and pirated software.
7. Removal of libelous, biased, unsourced, or poorly sourced contentious material that violates the policy on biographies of living persons (BLP). What counts as exempt under BLP can be controversial. Consider reporting to an Administrator instead of relying on this exemption.

 Important: If you are claiming an exemption, make sure there is a clearly visible edit summary or separate section of the talk page that explains the exemption. When in doubt, do not revert. Instead, engage in dispute resolution, and in particular ask for help from an Administrator.

Other revert rules

Additional restrictions on reverting are sometimes imposed on particular editors and/or particular pages, by Scratchpad Administrators, or by the community (see Editing restrictions). These may be phrased using such terms as 1RR (“one-revert rule”), or 0RR (“zero-revert rule”). A one-revert rule is often analogous to the three-revert rule as described above, with the words “more than three reverts” replaced by “more than one revert”. Often there is also a requirement to discuss each of the reversions on the article talk page, and sometimes the words “24-hour period” are also replaced by “1 week”. A zero-revert rule means a complete prohibition on reverts (as defined for the purposes of the three-revert rule, above). Editors can also voluntarily agree to abide by a stricter standard on reverting such as 1RR or 0RR, either in response to problems in a particular area, or as a general editing philosophy. For more details, see Scratchpad:Revert only when necessary.

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at WP:3RR. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Scratchpad, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Licence.