On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the lovely heading "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has added restrictions".
Gee, that is hardly what I have said. We used to fully protect in cases that we now semi-protect. That's a net gain for openness.
If there are actually cases where articles that were previously protected are now semi-protected. Except that article weren't really ever permanently protected in the first place.
One of the previous rules about protected articles was that *no one* was supposed to edit them, including the admins who were technically able to edit them. I'm sure you could slant that as another gain for openness, though. Is allowing only admins to edit more or less open than allowing no one to edit?
It's difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest critical analyses of the effects of his policies.
Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing studies of how semi-protection is used.
Then you probably gathered these statistics: What was the average time of page protection before semi-protection was implemented? Now what is the average time of page protection and the average time of semi-protection?