[WikiEN-l] Page protection vs. semi-protection

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 3/13/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/13/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > Just allowing people to report errors isn't a problem.  The problems
> > are acting on those reports without first verifying the true facts,
> > and removing entire articles simply because some of the facts in that
> > article are inaccurate.  Then of course there's the problem of
> > protecting articles, though that one's probably arguable (now that
> > semi-protection exists I can't personally think of a scenario where
> > full protection is *ever* a good idea).
> >
> The argument is that since any form of protection is an unwanted
> state, it's in certain senses better when it bothers more people -- it
> motivates people to fix the underlying problems.
[....]
> If this doesn't make sense I can try to do a better job of explaining.

No, that does make sense.  Though the way I see it, especially since
the advent of the three revert rule, page protection only makes sense
when dealing with sockpuppets, and semi-protection is a good
protection against that which still allows established editors.

And if page protection is only used in that way - in the face of a
distributed sockpuppet attack, I really don't see how semi-protection
hinders solving the underlying problems.

But I suppose this presumes that page protection is only used in this
limited sense, which doesn't reflect how it is actually used in
practice.

To my mind, a fully protected page is the absolute worst state a page
can be in.  A vandalized but editable page is even better, in my
opinion.

Anthony