Rory Stolzenberg wrote:
Right, but it doesn't protect against vandals who registered, didn't edit for 4 days and the vandalized. If they're vandalizing templates, they're not just people who come to Wikipedia and say "wow, i can delete this entire page lol!" - they're vandals who've been doing it for a while and are familiar with Wikipedia, so they probably know how to get around semi-protection.
I know you people have heard it all before from me (though not necessarily in this forum), but that's a compelling argument for greater obscurity with regards to the "auto-confirmed" status of registered user accounts, instead of this time-based system that's bloody fuck easy to circumvent.
Four days is a joke. ANY fixed duration of time is a joke once somebody figures it out.
Don't know if anybody remembers the "piss christ" vandal (in fact, [[WP:DENY|policy will soon tell us]] that we aren't supposed to), but this guy would typically launch an attack on each daily featured article shortly after 00:00 (UTC). Not sure what happened to him, maybe he got a job at a museum or something, but after a couple history pages full of vandal edits, rollbacks, and no other activiity, somebody finally decides to be the bad guy and semi-protect the page.
Fair enough, right, everybody knows Splash (bless his heart) will be along shortly to make sure we're not ruining anybody's fun. I mean, people have lawns to mow and cars to wax, we can't ethically make them wait around 15-30 minutes for the golden padlock to go away. Of course not, that would be cruel and unusual, so it gets unprotected, and then it's business as usual, ad nauseum.
But seriously folks, what do you do in a situation like this? Well, first you create a damn good diversion of some sort, then, once you're confident that the eyes of scrutiny are facing away from the protection log, you lock the page again, because the situation there is reaching a pathological state, the level which mother slashdot herself could never be blamed for.
And all the sudden your stomach turns and you're overcome by the same shit-out-of-luck feeling you had back in April (you know, that time when your brake pedal felt like a wet sponge) and you realize you're dealing you're dealing with one hardcore motherscratcher here, he's got some four dozen additional accounts to post from, fully matured ones, probably leftovers from [[Cool (song)]]'s heyday.
So then you upgrade to full protection and wonder why nobody did that from the get-go. You walk away from this experience, I don't know, maybe ten percent more cynical than you were the day before. Well, half of your buddies pat you on the back, but the others just tell you your too lazy to revert shit, to say nothing of the cheap shots: "You never assume good faith!"
Now, that's not necessarily bad thing, mind you, especially if you happen to work in retail. But, then, your nametag doesn't say "Helen Keller" either, presumably.
--f.o.n.