On our newest wiki (banwiki), I find myself needing to null-edit (edit, change nothing, save) a large number of pages in a row. I am running into far too frequent edit-rate warnings, presumably because I am a new editor on that wiki.
Proposal: Null edits should be ignored when figuring a user's edit rate. (This would in effect remove limits on the rate at which null edits could be performed by any user.)
Reasoning:
- Null edits literally do not "count" as edits, so they should not be treated like "real" edits for the purpose of rate limiting.
- Because they do not result in changes to the source of a page, there is less reason to limit them.
- They do refresh the page cache and update categories and WhatLinksHere, which is useful for fixing problems sometimes found on newly created wikis. Not limiting them can therefore speed up the process of fixing a (somewhat) broken wiki.
Side question: Since null edits don't "count" as edits, does this mean that my null edits are not getting me any closer to becoming autoconfirmed (or whatever the group is that's granted a higher edit rate)?
(Note that I know of other ways of accomplishing my immediate goal on banwiki, so that's not the point of this task. It's more about whether it's "right" to limit null edits in the first place and whether there's an efficient way to avoid doing so.)