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

[Tony Sidaway]

I'm undertaking to have all article and talk page semiprotections on
Wikipedia reviewed.  The process I'm using is to enter a brief
proposal on the article talk page and contact the protecting sysop.
The idea is that we discuss whether to unprotect the article or talk
page and watch it vigilantly.

This has already met considerable success, with more 30% of the
proposals I've made this evening being enacted upon.  There appear to
be a lot of semiprotections that have simply been forgotten by the
original sysop.

I'll keep this up until I either run out of articles to review or get
bored.  Since there are several thousand semiprotected article the
latter is more likely to happen first.

Gwern Branwen wonders whether semiprotections have taken over from
protections.  Well one cannot really compare the current Wikipedia
with the Wikipedia of 2005.  Then we had no real way of dealing with
biographies of living persons, and little awareness of the problem,
and as for the protected articles, they numbered dozens at the most,
and certainly not thousands.  It's important to strike a balance.
While many of the semiprotected pages may actually be redirects that
we wouldn't normally want to see edited by unregistered users, I
suspect many are not.  It's always a good idea to review the situation
regularly.