On 5/25/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
Semi-protection together with listing a page in a well-watched category is a perfectly fine method for dealing with problem articles and, as has been stated many times, much preferable to the hard protection which we would likely be using instead for the same purpose if semi-protection didn't exist. It's a community method which is open to all serious existing contributors, and reasonably open to new ones (they just have to wait a few days).
The only thing we need to be cautious about is silent creep of permanently semi-protected pages, not out of maliciousness, but simply because people forget to unprotect, esp. after the label is removed. Maintenance categories and the like can hopefully take care of that, though.
Since we don't want to add potentially confusing messages to the user, but want to have a template that would give us a tool to link semi-protected articles in a category, how about placing a semi-protection notice in the Talk page instead of the main article page?