--- Arwel Parry arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk wrote:
Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like to argue that we should be neither afraid of semi-protecting articles, nor ashamed of doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it, and for historical reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams and players - a field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding amount of vandalism. The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no longer possible to assure the quality of articles through simple reversion - it's just happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I semi-protected [[Wayne Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15 months, and I suggest interested people take a look at that articles' edit history before and after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users was incessant before protection, but the semi-protection has not prevented the article from being constructively edited since then, while I think I'm correct in saying we've had nothing that would be construed as out-and-out vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most recent bout of semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having so much vandalism that a major piece of vandalism - the player's middle name, in large font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an incorrect state for no less than 54 hours.
It's time to recognise that there are whole classes of articles - sports players and teams, for example - which attract a large amount of attention from particularly immature non-logged-in editors, and that these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a virtually permanent basis. The requirement to have had a registered user for a few days before editing does discourage the great majority of drive-by vandals, and does not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.
Your arguement does make sense, of course, but it wouldn't make any sense to go as far as you're suggesting and then stop there. You want to sprotect all the sports articles, someone else will want to protect all the sexuality articles, someone else all the articles on celebrities or living people in general, and so on. If we're going to go through protecting every one of our popular articles, leaving only articles no one ever reads unprotected, we might as well just protect them all.
Except this wouldn't really make sense either. If we're going to protect them all, it would make more sense at that point to allow everyone to edit as soon as they make an account, but require email validation of the account. This way, someone can spot an article they want to change, make an account, and a few minutes later be editing the article.
Having to use their email address to sign up, and allowing only 1 account per email address, would still end the vast majority of vandalism; the average bored teenager who is vandalizing articles is not likely to bother setting up an account, and if he does, once it gets blocked he's not likely to bother setting up another.
Making new editors wait 4 days before they can edit articles is not reasonable, and shouldn't be done on a wide scale.
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