[Wikipedia-l] Protected pages

Tom Parmenter wrote: Freezing articles is the very height of anti-wiki -- not only can't the warring parties contribute, *no one* can contribute to the article in question except the sysop "cabal". (And what if one party to the dispute *is* a sysop, as seems to happen not infrequently?) The only reason the main page is frozen is to discourage petty vandalism on our front door. (And the main page, I will point out, is not an encyclopedia article.) Which reminds me... here's my periodic sweep of all the articles currently frozen: [[Main_Page]] See above. [[Seneca]] There's no justification for this in its very light edit history. No talk page. I assume some sysop hit the "protect" link by mistake...? I've unprotected it. [[Titulus_Regius]] Isis protected it, giving as justification in the talk page that it contains a source text. I've unprotected it, as it is ultimately an _article_, large citation or no large citation. There are better ways to create and reference an uneditable document if you want to, and none of them include blocking out edit access to encyclopedia articles. [[Wikipedia:Upload_log]] [[Wikipedia:Deletion_log]] [[Wikipedia:Blocked_IPs]] Auto-maintained log pages that should not be manually edited. [[Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License]] We need to have a copy of the license in the work, and that definitely shouldn't be editable! Note that this is *not* an encyclopedia article, unlike [[Titulus Regius]]. The article *about* the GFDL is freely editable. [[Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not]] [[Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view]] [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] [[Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines]] [[Wikipedia:IP_probation_watchlist]] [[Wikipedia:Most_common_Wikipedia_faux_pas]] [[Wikipedia:Policy_on_permanent_deletion_of_pages]] [[Wikipedia:Naming_conventions]] [[Wikipedia:Administrators]] [[Wikipedia:Policy]] [[Wikipedia:Database_queries]] Various policy and help pages. I'm a lot more leery of these being protected, but again they're not encyclopedia articles so it's not _completely_ anti-the-whole-point-of-the-exercise. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)