On 3/27/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I would tend to agree. The "stable versions" feature should make a lot of this unnecessary. But now that we have the ability to make semi-protection time limited, this should likely be the default attempt.
bobolozo wrote:
We now have about 1500 articles in Category:Semi-protected, which new editors and IP addresses can't edit. I picked a few at random, and most I checked were entirely uncontroversial articles which had briefly had some trouble from an IP address, which was over months ago and there was no reason to believe it would ever occur again.
This is in violation of one of our basic principles.
Would it not make more sense for admins to be expected to automatically make this sort of semi-protection have a time limit, assuming there was no reason to believe the article was a permanent vandal magnet?
An ever growing list of permanently semi-protected articles is not what we want, especially given that it's happening out of sheer laziness.
On a related note, I think it would be a good idea to semi-protect all portals. There's no good reason for new editors to be changing portals, which are all code and no content. All the content they might want to edit is in the subpages, and I have never seen a constructive portal edit by an IP. (I'm sure there are some, but they are probably all by Wikipedians who weren't signed in.) Portals get blanked regularly, and often remain that way for significant periods of time.
-Sage