On 10/20/07, George Herbert george.herbert@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