[WikiEN-l] Putting some perspective on the end of Wikipedia

[Joseph Reagle]

On Friday 04 September 2009, Joseph Reagle wrote:
> One of the best responses to some of the hyperbole out there about the closing, failure, end of WP is the figure of how many articles are actually locked down in any way, however, this is a difficult figure to authoritatively find/claim. There's Main and Featured [1] of course, about 11 protected articles [2], and then 785 semi-protected [3].

OK, so the protected categories aren't reliable, after some digging, here's some figures:

[[
The recent focus on Wikipedia "failing" or being "closed" merit some figures and explanation. On the afternoon of Sept 04, 2009 the English Wikipedia with 3,024,063 articles.

The [Special:ProtectedPages][1] for the Article namespace tells us:

* 5,137 articles are protected (that's 0.17% of all articles).
* The majority of those, (3,553 articles or 69% of protected articles), are semi-protected, meaning that while they aren't editable by anonymous users, they are by Wikipedians (i.e., those that sign up for an account and don't do anything stupid).
* Therefore, only 1,583 articles (.05%) are fully protected, and not available to editing by non-administrative Wikipedians.
* Of all the articles being protected, 1337 of them (26%) are set to expired, most within a month or two.

That's the status quo. Yet, some means of flagging a vetted version of an article has been [discussed since 2005][2]. The current widely [discussed idea][3] is to conduct a two month experiment in which [biographies of living people][4] (402,672 articles, about 13% of the English Wikipedia) or more likely *some subset* thereof are "flag protected" which means anyone *can still edit* but the public (not Wikipedians) see the last reviewed version. This doesn't necessarily replace the existing protection mechanisms, but could be a good alternative to semi-protection. The experiment will helpfully give guidance on who should be a "Reviewer" and how long it takes time to review and flag a newer version. Another part of the experiment is "partrolled revisions" which would apply to a wider swath of articles and permit vandalism fighters to bookmark a known good version so they can easily evaluate subsequent contributions, but it won't affect who can edit or what the public sees.

The goal of this, and other features, is to maximize the benefits of open collaboration while limiting the damage from disruptive edits. This has always been the case and Wikipedia continues to experiment with achieving the best balance.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ProtectedPages
[2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-08-31/Flagged_protection_background
[3]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions
[4]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people

]]

Does that sound right?