I believe there are 2 points to consider, one that's pretty easy to fix, and another of a more philosophical matter:
1. The fact that there are currently too many protected and semi-protected articles. I've been going through these and unprotecting those that had been protected for too long. If there was no discussion on the talk page, or I just figured it was time for unprotecting, I did so. Most of them appear to be just fine--no instant vandalism or edit wars. Yesterday I unprotected an article that had been fully protected since *October*.. le sigh. Hopefully, with the protection end-date feature, that will never happen again.
2. The indefinite semi-protection of some articles. I think everyone would rather we never had to protect/sprotect anything. However some articles are more attractive targets than others. After I unprotected [[Bill Cosby]], for instance, it was instantly vandalised multiple times, as was [[Black Death]] (which I finally just re-semi-protected out of exasperation). I would rather that no pages were protected for long periods of time, but vandalism does not just happen *anywhere* -- I believe many vandals will type in the first thing they think of and vandalize that. If they are unable to vandalize, a certain percentage will think "oh, that sucks" and move on to some other non-wiki activity.
My two cents,
Erica User:Fang Aili
On 3/29/07, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com wrote:
[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2 have been sprotected for major portions of the last month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and only one has never been protected.
In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan, Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major topic you look at, if they're not protected currently, they have been recently.
We seem to be sliding towards a policy of semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
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