2009/9/5 Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com:
Would it be possible for you to do a comparison with Wikipedia just before semiprotection was enabled? I've long wanted to know whether the argument that semiprotections would replace full protections holds any water.
Such a comparison should be possible. We have protection logs, we should be able to go through them and work out how many articles were (semi-)protected at any given time. A graph of that data would reveal any obvious impact of the introduction of semi protection (work out a trend from the data before the introduction and see if the data after it fits it or not).
Is there a machine readable version of the protection log anywhere?