Are diamond mods allowed to lock questions which they were involved in an edit war?

Question

The question originally called Who shovels shit in full communism? has been locked with a comment by diamond mod Philipp saying

This question was locked due to an edit war. Please do not put profanity into question titles. If you would like to discuss this, please open a question on meta.

and a message saying

This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta.

However, one of the people involved in the edit war is Philipp himself, on revisions 2 and 6.

I think this is inappropriate - if a diamond mod is involved in an edit war, then another diamond mod should decide to lock the question if there is too much edit warring.

Are diamond mods allowed to lock questions due to edit warring when they are one of the edit warriors?

Related question: Bowdlerisation and varieties of English

Answer 1

It's not really an edit war when a mod does it.

Philipp, presumably in his role as moderator, removed questionable language (which in sight of longstanding policy and the current bans from the HNQ seems reasonable), which was then reinstated multiple times. To enforce the initial decision, he locked the question.

This seem like normal mod actions which don't require a second opinion.

In general it might be a good idea to require two or more moderators for important decisions (eg rejecting CoC violation flags, banning users (for more than X days)), etc. But AFAIK that's not a system SE currently uses (and the sites would probably need more moderators for that), and I don't see why this case should be different.

Answer 2

I think Philipp's actions are fine here. The initial edit was just making the language of the post fit in with the site's policies. This triggered the minor edit war as the original poster kept reverting and suggested changes back to the original language. Under the circumstances it seems that locking the post and staying a discussion on meta is exactly the right thing to do to get everyone involved discussing the pros and cons directly, rather than doing so via comments on their edits.

If agreement can be reached in the meta discussion then the post can be edited to a final form to everyone's acceptance and the post unlocked again.

If a moderator just edits in their own preferred wording and locks the post, and that's the end of it, then it's more of a problem, but when it is about conforming a post to site policy, and done temporarily while the meta discussion happens, then I'm fine with it.