On 10/17/06, Parker Peters onmywayoutster@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/16/06, Rory Stolzenberg rory096@gmail.com wrote:
Temporarily, it can be useful, but admins tend to forget to unprotect it; look at my user page for an example. While my userpage isn't a talk page (and it doesn't matter enough to me to get it unprotected), it's an example of something that an admin protected from vandalism then completely forgot about and never unprotected.
I was gone, but this one's piqued my interest, so here's what I have to say on the matter:
Our backend code is stupid.
Protection should not be "forever until it is turned off." Instead, like blocking any just about anything else, it should have a duration after which it automatically expires.
We've got some article pages that have been "Protected" for weeks or longer, with no edit and next to no discussions on the talk pages, because either some admin is too damn lazy to remove the protection or enjoys keeping it protected because they feel they own the article that way.
There's been a feature request for this for some time:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4133
Implementing this would probably require a fairly extensive change to the database schema, so I don't know how willing the devs would be to implement it, considering it's only really a feature request and not a critical problem.
Perhaps what we need is something like Ipblocklist, but to show protected pages. VoABot keeps WP:PP updated well enough, but a special page would be a better solution.