[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia page protection report

[Anthere]

Erik Moeller wrote:

> Today I decided to analyze in more detail to what extent articles across 
> Wikipedias remain protected for long periods of time. The report is at:
> 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005
> 
> (To developers: The script I used is 'logprot.pl' in my home directory. 
> It may be desirable to make this available as a special page, if someone 
> can figure out a way to make the query scale.)
> 
> It shows all pages in all language Wikipedias that have been protected 
> for more than 14 days. Note that, by the time you look at it, some of 
> the pages in it may have been unprotected already.
> 
> The Wikipedias with the most such protected pages are (article rank in 
> parentheses):
> 
> German   - 253  (2)
> Japanese - 165  (4)
> English  - 138  (1)
> Italian  - 19   (5)
> French   - 15   (3)
> Spanish  - 13   (10)
> 
> This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used 
> excessively on the German Wikipedia. It is quite striking that many, 
> many controversial articles have been protected for months. For example, 
> articles about veganism, sex, democracy, abortion, astrology, Karlheinz 
> Deschner (famous atheist writer), Silvio Gesell (controversial 
> economist) and his Freiwirtschaft theory, Gorleben (controversial 
> nuclear waste disposal site), and Egon Krenz (East German politician) 
> have been protected since July. Articles about child sexual abuse and 
> pedophilia have been protected since April 2005 and March 2005, 
> respectively. Notably, in the child sexual abuse case, the article was 
> also cut down from 54,000 characters to 2,000 before being protected, 
> making it effectively useless -- a rather drastic measure to deal with 
> ongoing controversies.
> 
> The longest protected articles appear to be related to German student 
> corporations. The record holder is [[de:Schmiss]], which has been 
> protected since January after a neutrality dispute.
> 
> Perhaps ironically, even the article about Wikipedia itself has been 
> protected since August 25.
> 
> Note that the local policy on protection, at 
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seitensperrung and 
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administratoren , is not unusal 
> and recommends only short protections except for very high exposure 
> pages like the Main Page, or unimportant pages like redirects which are 
> frequently vandalized. This raises the question why no bold admin has 
> unprotected these articles yet.
> 
> I cannot say anything about the protection patterns on the Japanese 
> Wikipedia, which is the only one which stands out besides English and 
> German. The long term protections on the English Wikipedia appear to be 
> mostly accidental. When someone notices that a page has been protected 
> for very long, it is generally quickly unprotected.
> 
> Across languages, possibly with the exception of Japanese, the German 
> Wikipedia is alone in the pattern of locking down controversial articles 
> for months. Protected articles also seem to not be tagged as such, so 
> that visitors do not see a reason for the protection on the page (a 
> visible marker might also encourage sysops to unprotect the page).
> 
> One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more 
> relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add 
> information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors, 
> they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions 
> beyond the articles concerned.
> 
> I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing 
> complexity:
> 
> * limit protections by policy
> * add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in 
> the article namespace
> * add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
> 
> I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Erik

Interesting...

One point which does not seem factual to me in your report, but possibly 
only an interpretation is

"> One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
 > relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
 > information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
 > they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
 > beyond the articles concerned."

This is only true if there is no social norm forbidding a sysop to edit 
a protected page. At least, on the english and french wikipedia, I do 
think the rule of no-edit on a protected page exist. Maybe not on all 
projects ? Can you from your data gather such an information ? I mean, 
are there situations when a long-protected article actually grow and 
evolve during the protection ?

Ant