[[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.
I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both protected again. In looking at those who vandalized those pages, what I found is that almost all of them vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.
My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism - it just spreads it around. Instead of messing up our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular ones and mess those up instead.
I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it makes life easier for the editors who watch those articles. The rather more substantial negative side to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.
I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it basically makes no sense. If we aren't going to let new editors edit articles, we might as well just come out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the whole database.
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