[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2 have been sprotected for major portions of the last month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and only one has never been protected.
In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan, Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major topic you look at, if they're not protected currently, they have been recently.
We seem to be sliding towards a policy of semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both protected again. In looking at those who vandalized those pages, what I found is that almost all of them vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.
My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism - it just spreads it around. Instead of messing up our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular ones and mess those up instead.
I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it makes life easier for the editors who watch those articles. The rather more substantial negative side to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.
I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it basically makes no sense. If we aren't going to let new editors edit articles, we might as well just come out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the whole database.
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I believe there are 2 points to consider, one that's pretty easy to fix, and another of a more philosophical matter:
1. The fact that there are currently too many protected and semi-protected articles. I've been going through these and unprotecting those that had been protected for too long. If there was no discussion on the talk page, or I just figured it was time for unprotecting, I did so. Most of them appear to be just fine--no instant vandalism or edit wars. Yesterday I unprotected an article that had been fully protected since *October*.. le sigh. Hopefully, with the protection end-date feature, that will never happen again.
2. The indefinite semi-protection of some articles. I think everyone would rather we never had to protect/sprotect anything. However some articles are more attractive targets than others. After I unprotected [[Bill Cosby]], for instance, it was instantly vandalised multiple times, as was [[Black Death]] (which I finally just re-semi-protected out of exasperation). I would rather that no pages were protected for long periods of time, but vandalism does not just happen *anywhere* -- I believe many vandals will type in the first thing they think of and vandalize that. If they are unable to vandalize, a certain percentage will think "oh, that sucks" and move on to some other non-wiki activity.
My two cents,
Erica User:Fang Aili
On 3/29/07, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com wrote:
[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2 have been sprotected for major portions of the last month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and only one has never been protected.
In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan, Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major topic you look at, if they're not protected currently, they have been recently.
We seem to be sliding towards a policy of semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
<snip>
I rather think all of this misses the point. Vandalism to our most popular articles is not really a problem: new users/anons editing those articles isn't a problem either. Reverts are easy.
Something we should really think about, though, is semi-protecting our quality articles; GAs and/or FAs. The current state of affairs, where quality articles deteriorate very rapidly if no one is looking after them due to people introducing questionable junk that isn't out-and-out vandalism, is not acceptable. Semi-protection would help here, because those responsible for introducing this kind of material - often trivia - are usually anons.
Moreschi
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On 3/29/07, Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
I rather think all of this misses the point. Vandalism to our most popular articles is not really a problem: new users/anons editing those articles isn't a problem either. Reverts are easy.
Something we should really think about, though, is semi-protecting our quality articles; GAs and/or FAs. The current state of affairs, where quality articles deteriorate very rapidly if no one is looking after them due to people introducing questionable junk that isn't out-and-out vandalism, is not acceptable. Semi-protection would help here, because those responsible for introducing this kind of material - often trivia - are usually anons.
Moreschi
I don't know how true this is for most FAs, but those I've previously been involved with end up being defeatured due to increasing standards for FAs. Some of the finest (IMO) featured articles I've been involved in, on the other hand, don't seem to have deteriorated all that much despite becoming featured over a year ago. (Though to be fair, they're on obscure topics.)
It seems to me that the FAs most prone to such nonsense are those which also happen to be extremely famous (oh God, I remember the frustration I had dealing with [[Theodore Roosevelt]] due to overenthusiastic editors introducing material on trivialities and downplaying his actual achievements - not to mention their penchant for calling him "TR" instead of Roosevelt). I'm wary about introducing full protection on these articles, though. We got a lot of good content that could be shipped out to subarticles that might not have materialised at all if people went "Damn it, this thing's protected - I guess I won't write anything about TR's African expedition after all."
Johnleemk
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I hoping that once the bugfix gets activated to add a namespace selector to [[Special:Protected pages]] it will be a lot easier to spot issues like this.
en: xaosflux
- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Erica" fangaili@gmail.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 10:57 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] More concerns about wide scale article protection
I believe there are 2 points to consider, one that's pretty easy to fix, and another of a more philosophical matter:
- The fact that there are currently too many protected and
semi-protected articles. I've been going through these and unprotecting those that had been protected for too long. If there was no discussion on the talk page, or I just figured it was time for unprotecting, I did so. Most of them appear to be just fine--no instant vandalism or edit wars. Yesterday I unprotected an article that had been fully protected since *October*.. le sigh. Hopefully, with the protection end-date feature, that will never happen again. ... Erica User:Fang Aili
Unfortunately, we still get messages to the help desk and through other channels from people who come across a high-profile article when it's in a vandalized state. The most-viewed pages are attractive targets for vandals as well as honest readers. If you keep those unprotected more people are going to see the vandalism even if it's reverted quickly. If these articles are protected, vandalism is still easy to spot by vandalhunters but not so much by the casual reader.
Mgm
Erica wrote:
I believe many vandals will type in the first thing they think of and vandalize that. If they are unable to vandalize, a certain percentage will think "oh, that sucks" and move on to some other non-wiki activity.
It seems as though you are assuming that they are not smart enough to discover the "Random page" function. :-)
Ec
On 3/31/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Erica wrote:
I believe many vandals will type in the first thing they think of and vandalize that. If they are unable to vandalize, a certain percentage will think "oh, that sucks" and move on to some other non-wiki activity.
It seems as though you are assuming that they are not smart enough to discover the "Random page" function. :-)
Ec
Of course some do use the random page function. And of course vandalism can occur anywhere. It is just fact that some articles are bigger targets than others.
Erica
In message 20070329142331.67973.qmail@web63508.mail.re1.yahoo.com, bobolozo bobolozo-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org writes
[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2 have been sprotected for major portions of the last month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and only one has never been protected.
In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan, Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major topic you look at, if they're not protected currently, they have been recently.
We seem to be sliding towards a policy of semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both protected again. In looking at those who vandalized those pages, what I found is that almost all of them vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.
My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism
- it just spreads it around. Instead of messing up
our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular ones and mess those up instead.
I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it makes life easier for the editors who watch those articles. The rather more substantial negative side to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.
I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it basically makes no sense. If we aren't going to let new editors edit articles, we might as well just come out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the whole database.
Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like to argue that we should be neither afraid of semi-protecting articles, nor ashamed of doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it, and for historical reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams and players - a field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding amount of vandalism. The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no longer possible to assure the quality of articles through simple reversion - it's just happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I semi-protected [[Wayne Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15 months, and I suggest interested people take a look at that articles' edit history before and after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users was incessant before protection, but the semi-protection has not prevented the article from being constructively edited since then, while I think I'm correct in saying we've had nothing that would be construed as out-and-out vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most recent bout of semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having so much vandalism that a major piece of vandalism - the player's middle name, in large font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an incorrect state for no less than 54 hours.
It's time to recognise that there are whole classes of articles - sports players and teams, for example - which attract a large amount of attention from particularly immature non-logged-in editors, and that these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a virtually permanent basis. The requirement to have had a registered user for a few days before editing does discourage the great majority of drive-by vandals, and does not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.
I should add that I take a "robust" attitude to vandal non-logged-in users: 1 warning on the talk page, then I can sometimes be quite merciless with repeat vandals with regard to giving a long-term block; also if they've clocked up a "final warning" from someone else, then the next time they vandalise they don't get another warning, they get blocked - no messing around; in three and a half years as an admin, I've never had a complaint about my activities.
--- Arwel Parry arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk wrote:
Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like to argue that we should be neither afraid of semi-protecting articles, nor ashamed of doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it, and for historical reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams and players - a field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding amount of vandalism. The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no longer possible to assure the quality of articles through simple reversion - it's just happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I semi-protected [[Wayne Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15 months, and I suggest interested people take a look at that articles' edit history before and after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users was incessant before protection, but the semi-protection has not prevented the article from being constructively edited since then, while I think I'm correct in saying we've had nothing that would be construed as out-and-out vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most recent bout of semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having so much vandalism that a major piece of vandalism - the player's middle name, in large font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an incorrect state for no less than 54 hours.
It's time to recognise that there are whole classes of articles - sports players and teams, for example - which attract a large amount of attention from particularly immature non-logged-in editors, and that these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a virtually permanent basis. The requirement to have had a registered user for a few days before editing does discourage the great majority of drive-by vandals, and does not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.
Your arguement does make sense, of course, but it wouldn't make any sense to go as far as you're suggesting and then stop there. You want to sprotect all the sports articles, someone else will want to protect all the sexuality articles, someone else all the articles on celebrities or living people in general, and so on. If we're going to go through protecting every one of our popular articles, leaving only articles no one ever reads unprotected, we might as well just protect them all.
Except this wouldn't really make sense either. If we're going to protect them all, it would make more sense at that point to allow everyone to edit as soon as they make an account, but require email validation of the account. This way, someone can spot an article they want to change, make an account, and a few minutes later be editing the article.
Having to use their email address to sign up, and allowing only 1 account per email address, would still end the vast majority of vandalism; the average bored teenager who is vandalizing articles is not likely to bother setting up an account, and if he does, once it gets blocked he's not likely to bother setting up another.
Making new editors wait 4 days before they can edit articles is not reasonable, and shouldn't be done on a wide scale.
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