On 6/17/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/17/the-new-york-times-...
Since no one else has pointed it out, here's their "correction": A front-page headline on Saturday with an article about the online reference work Wikipedia referred imprecisely to its "anyone can edit" guidelines, which have always restricted changes in a small percentage of articles. While Wikipedia has indeed added a category of articles that are "semi-protected" from editing, it has not "revised" its policy or otherwise put additional restrictions on editing; it says the change is intended to reduce the number of entries on which editing is banned altogether. --
I'm not sure what our '"anyone can edit" guidelines' are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction ?
I am uncomfortable with saying "the change is intended to reduce the number of entries on which editing is banned altogether" - in practice, I think it's used on many articles where people just get sick of cleaning up the vandalism by hand, and the threshold for use is probably lower than the threshold for using full protection. It's a perfectly acceptable compromise to me, but we should be honest about it.
I also note there is very little at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-protection or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy which explictly says that semi-protection is intended to improve openness or "anyone can edit"-ness.
There is also a link to a post from Jimbo a few months ago, which includes this quote: "2. A great many minor bios of slightly well known but controversial individuals are subject to POV pushing trolling, including vandalism, and it seems likely that in such cases, not enough people have these on their personal watchlists to police them as well as we would like. Semi-protection would at least eliminate the drive-by nonsense that we see so often." http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-May/046883.html
That seems to support the notion that semi-protection should be used in cases where previously no protection at all applied.
Is my conscience pricking me unnecessarily?
Steve