The Cunctator wrote:
But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for semi-protection. It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more open than before, when we only had the tool of protection. But it is not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.
A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean by "more open" here? What's the metric?
Under full protection, no one was able to edit, except for admins, and by social custom, admins were not to edit except for in certain very minor ways. In effect, even for articles where there was major breaking news, the articles had to be kept closed.
Under semi-protection, we have been able to relax this. Anonymous ip numbers and accounts less than 4 days old can not edit, but anyone else can. This has proven to be remarkably effective in preserving both the ability of people of good will of diverse viewpoints to join the dialogue, and the exclusion of random driveby vandalism.
I think that semi-protection could be improved. We recently had a good conversation here about how to change the user interface around it to make it less off-putting and more inviting for people to participate.
If random people writing "George Bush is a poopy head" are excluded from an article, but people of various legitimate (though often wrong, say, or different from mine, or whatever) opinions can participate, where before, BOTH groups were excluded, then I think that is a net win for openness.
I would be happy to see full protection go away completely. It still exists at the moment, and it does serve some purpose, namely as a "cooling off period" type of thing, which is often softer and more open than dragging people before an ArbCom proceeding to ban them.
I think there should be no articles which are full-protected for more than a day or two (with of course reasonable exceptions for unusual circumstances), and I think that there are probably many articles which should be semi-protected for a fairly longish period of time. (Where we have repeated driveby trolling for example.)
I also think that a "stable version" approach is much better than protection, in the sense that if done well, then we can leave a lot of things unprotected, knowing that the random vandalism will never hit the "public page" anyway.
--Jimbo