In message <20070329142331.67973.qmail(a)web63508.mail.re1.yahoo.com>om>,
bobolozo <bobolozo-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w(a)public.gmane.org> writes
[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most
viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are
currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2
have been sprotected for major portions of the last
month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and
only one has never been protected.
In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and
you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan,
Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major
topic you look at, if they're not protected currently,
they have been recently.
We seem to be sliding towards a policy of
semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by
requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both
protected again. In looking at those who vandalized
those pages, what I found is that almost all of them
vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.
My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles
does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism
- it just spreads it around. Instead of messing up
our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular
ones and mess those up instead.
I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all
popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it
makes life easier for the editors who watch those
articles. The rather more substantial negative side
to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have
certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and
moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit
for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.
I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of
sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it
basically makes no sense. If we aren't going to let
new editors edit articles, we might as well just come
out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the
whole database.
Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like to argue that we
should be neither afraid of semi-protecting articles, nor ashamed of
doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it, and for historical
reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams and players - a
field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding amount of vandalism.
The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no longer possible to
assure the quality of articles through simple reversion - it's just
happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I semi-protected [[Wayne
Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15 months, and I suggest
interested people take a look at that articles' edit history before and
after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users was incessant before
protection, but the semi-protection has not prevented the article from
being constructively edited since then, while I think I'm correct in
saying we've had nothing that would be construed as out-and-out
vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most recent bout of
semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having so much vandalism
that a major piece of vandalism - the player's middle name, in large
font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an incorrect state for
no less than 54 hours.
It's time to recognise that there are whole classes of articles - sports
players and teams, for example - which attract a large amount of
attention from particularly immature non-logged-in editors, and that
these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a virtually permanent basis.
The requirement to have had a registered user for a few days before
editing does discourage the great majority of drive-by vandals, and does
not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.
I should add that I take a "robust" attitude to vandal non-logged-in
users: 1 warning on the talk page, then I can sometimes be quite
merciless with repeat vandals with regard to giving a long-term block;
also if they've clocked up a "final warning" from someone else, then the
next time they vandalise they don't get another warning, they get
blocked - no messing around; in three and a half years as an admin, I've
never had a complaint about my activities.
--
Arwel Parry