-----Original Message-----
From: John Lee [mailto:johnleemk@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 04:22 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [[Views of Lyndon LaRouche]] indefinitely full protected
On 10/20/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As I said in my other reply, this is far from the first article space full
> protection. It may be the first one implimented consciously and
> intentionally without a time limit on it, however.
>
> How many years of persistent, organized abuse does it take to justify
> sterner measures?
>
> If this is unnecessary a month from now, tomorrow, or next year, I or
> another administrator can unprotect. I don't have any authority to order
> it
> truly permanently protected; Jimmy or the Foundation or Arbcom might, but
> I
> don't. All I can do it state the case for the situation and see if the
> rest
> of the en.wp admin community agree and leave it, or disagree and overturn
> the protection.
As I understand it, this is how protection has always worked - at least
until the software supported automatic expiry of protections. Until then,
all articles were protected indefinitely until the dispute was cleared up.
This is still a perfectly valid thing to do today.
What perturbs me is why announce this to the mailing list if this is just a
routine protection? Did the policies on page protection change to mandate a
time limit for all protections?
Johnleemk
_______________________________________________
Our theory has usually been that, at some point, protection can be removed from even the most contentious articles. Given the nature of the LaRouche movement, which put bluntly, incorporates war on knowledge, it seems unlikely that protection could ever be removed. Now, as usual, we can anticipate inappropriate attempts to generalize what was necessary in this extreme situation to other situations. Once could say that the Bush administration, or the government of the PRC, or the Turkish government (or whoever) is also engaged in the same activity. And, of course they are, but in those cases there are contervailing forces eagerly presenting alternatives. Very few people are informed about the LaRouche movement, thus we have in our editing a confrontation between LaRouche operatives and a few experts who seriously study extreme groups. We can keep blocking LaRouche socks indefinitely without resolving the problem.
Fred