Okay, found out why. You need to account for [[Category:Wikipedia pages protected due to dispute]] and other protection categories, as well. Pages such as "Russell's teapot" and "Developed country" are in there, protected, but not tagged. The root cause seems to be that the category isn't itself a subcategory of some "protected pages" category. Specifically, there are protection templates <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Protection_templates> such as "Pp-dispute" that don't also include the page in one of the main "protected pages" categories you name. FT2 On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 2:29 PM, FT2 &lt;ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Try this instead to refute the "Wikipedia is dying" argument. Wikipedia's featured picture program started in May 2004. It took until 30 December 2007 to reach 1000 featured pictures. We're on track to reach number 2000 within a week: currently at 1973 FPs with 63 active nominations. It would be interesting if someone wrote a tool to check article citations. Footnoting has been getting more and more commonplace, as well as more extensive. -Durova On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 7:02 AM, FT2 &lt;ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- http://durova.blogspot.com/

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Joseph Reagle&lt;reagle(a)mit.edu&gt; wrote: Would it be possible for you to do a comparison with Wikipedia just before semiprotection was enabled? I've long wanted to know whether the argument that semiprotections would replace full protections holds any water. This would also seem to be quite important to know for flagged, inasmuch as that argument has been recycled for flagging pages... -- gwern

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Tony Sidaway&lt;tonysidaway(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Excellent idea. Some problem areas just are and will remain so, but a lot of problems were one particular set of editors beating on each other and not a general social or topic issue. Those go away over time. Thanks for the effort in doing that, Tony. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Tony Sidaway wrote: I agree that indefinite semi-protection is inimical to the purpose of the encyclopedia and should be subject to periodical review, so I regard this as a beneficial initiative. I wonder, however, how many of those articles are then edited by (a) editors who set up accounts and become auto-confirmed in order to do so, or (b) subject of {{editprotected}} requests on their talk pages. I took a quick look the other day at the categories of unsourced articles, which go back to December 2006; to be honest, I don't currently have the time or will myself to trawl through what is a Sisyphean task. Even limiting that to BLP articles is more than enough to tax the stamina of most volunteer editors. It's easy enough to begin a stub, and as easy to tag as unsourced, but it does take some commitment to take the bricks and fashion a mansion, which I think we should be doing.

Tony is right that these lists of long-term and indefinitely protected or semi-protected pages should be reviewed periodically. The place to find this information is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports There are about 3000 indefinitely permanently protected talk pages; they are almost all user talk pages and were protected at the time that the account was blocked. Most of those can be unprotected. They run back to 2006. There are 39 indefinitely fully protected article titles, the vast majority of which are soft redirects to Wiktionary or pages salted to prevent recreation. For the others, most are quite recent, and it would probably be appropriate to ask the protecting admin to review and, at minimum, set an end-date. In addition, there are 1478 indefinitely protected redirects, many of them to prevent forking. There are 1900+ indefinitely semiprotected articles, with many of them indicating they have been repeated vandalism targets. These include articles on recent US presidents, certain high profile musicians, politically charged subjects, and those with a wide and opinionated fandom. These should, of course, be periodically reviewed; however, if someone decides to unprotect many of these articles, I would hope they don't just keep it on their watchlist but actively review new edits regularly for a few weeks afterward. There are also 300+ indefinitely semiprotected redirects, which include repeatedly recreated articles previously deemed inappropriate, and titles associted with attempts to fork articles. These might bear review as well, either with a move up to full protection or semiprotection lifted on a trial basis, but again they would need to be monitored closely if they are unprotected. Of the approximately 400 talk pages and talk page redirects that are indefinitely semi-protected, almost all are user talk pages, many of admins who carry out antivandal work. There were about 30 article talk pages indefinitely semi-protected before Tony carried out his review, and there are quite a bit fewer now. There are some opportunities to improve practices here, and to really take a look and decide which articles (and rarely, article talk pages) need this indefinite protection. At the same time, I really do believe that if an admin is going to reduce protection on a page with an extensive history of problems, he or she has a responsibility to keep an eye on the page for at least a couple of weeks afterward to ensure there isn't a fresh outbreak of inappropriate behaviour. Since so many of the articles involved are BLPs, and even on non-BLPs the problems were related to inappropriate addition of information about LPs, this is an area where special sensitivity is required. Risker

I was away and missed the FR discussions, but I have to say this: the vanishing point is nowhere in sight! Charles

On 9/5/09, Charles Matthews &lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: FR? (Racks brains). I assume you mean flagged revisions?

Risker wrote: Agree with both points, naturally. But the discussion as a whole seems to indicate that "protection" has become one of our more Byzantine concepts. Some work ought to go on, simplifying it from a hypertext stance (categorisation and tagging), so that what happens is more transparent. Anyone interested in reviewing the system and writing an on-site essay? Charles

On 9/5/09, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You could probably use the MediaWiki API to do this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API Alternatively find some of the following regular reports easy to parse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports

About two-thirds of the 30 semiprotected talk pages (and in some case the associated articles) have been unprotected. One of the articles was reprotected after immediate spamming (to be fair, it *is* called "poop", so I was obviously very naive there!) The others are still unprotected. I've made slow, steady progress on the semiprotection reviews. You can see the results on my talk page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tony_Sidaway#Review_of_semiprotected… At the moment I'm dealing with the older indefinite semiprotections--those that have survived for two years--so quite a high proportion turn out to be obvious vandalism magnets or biographies of living persons that have encountered severe enough problems to become semiprotected. Of the remainder, about 18 out of 100 articles looked due for review so I put a note on each talk page and contacted the protecting admins. Of those 17 reviews, I withdrew one on further information, one has been declined by the sysop, three quickly reached consensus to keep protection, and four have been unprotected. leaving ten articles still under review. This is very slow work but I think we should probably do it from time to time, as part of the principle of keeping Wikipedia an open encyclopedia. On 9/6/09, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: