Semi-Protecting User Talk Pages - WikiEN-l

Oskar Sigvardsson

16 Oct 16 Oct

11:08 p.m.

On 10/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I've just gone and removed semi-protections from about a dozen user talk pages. All of them were targets of vandalism in the past, generally due to their own anti-vandalism efforts. The pages included pages of administrators. For obvious reasons, anyone who is warning and blocking new users in turn needs to be able to be contacted by these users with questions, concerns, etc. Semi-protection must not be used in this fashion, and I've removed the line supporting it from the semi-protection policy.

While I do agree with the general principle, I think there are certainly times where semi-protecting a talk page is warranted. If a useris being harrassed by a persistant sock-puppeteer for instance. Second, if a person recieves so much vandalism on his talk page that it's beginning to be a problem, I think semi-protecting it for a while is a good idea, atleast so that the user isn't driven away by all of the abuse he receives. That has a tendancy to happen with vandal-fighters. --Oskar

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Rory Stolzenberg

2:22 a.m.

Temporarily, it can be useful, but admins tend to forget to unprotect it; look at my user page for an example. While my userpage isn't a talk page (and it doesn't matter enough to me to get it unprotected), it's an example of something that an admin protected from vandalism then completely forgot about and never unprotected. On 10/16/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 10/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I've just gone and removed semi-protections from about a dozen user talk pages. All of them were targets of vandalism in the past, generally due to their own anti-vandalism efforts. The pages included pages of administrators. For obvious reasons, anyone who is warning and blocking new users in turn needs to be able to be contacted by these users with questions, concerns, etc. Semi-protection must not be used in this fashion, and I've removed the line supporting it from the semi-protection policy.

While I do agree with the general principle, I think there are certainly times where semi-protecting a talk page is warranted. If a useris being harrassed by a persistant sock-puppeteer for instance. Second, if a person recieves so much vandalism on his talk page that it's beginning to be a problem, I think semi-protecting it for a while is a good idea, atleast so that the user isn't driven away by all of the abuse he receives. That has a tendancy to happen with vandal-fighters. --Oskar _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Stephen Bain

7:21 a.m.

On 10/17/06, Parker Peters <onmywayoutster(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 10/16/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Temporarily, it can be useful, but admins tend to forget to unprotect it; look at my user page for an example. While my userpage isn't a talk page (and it doesn't matter enough to me to get it unprotected), it's an example of something that an admin protected from vandalism then completely forgot about and never unprotected.

I was gone, but this one's piqued my interest, so here's what I have to say on the matter: Our backend code is stupid. Protection should not be "forever until it is turned off." Instead, like blocking any just about anything else, it should have a duration after which it automatically expires. We've got some article pages that have been "Protected" for weeks or longer, with no edit and next to no discussions on the talk pages, because either some admin is too damn lazy to remove the protection or enjoys keeping it protected because they feel they own the article that way.

There's been a feature request for this for some time: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4133 Implementing this would probably require a fairly extensive change to the database schema, so I don't know how willing the devs would be to implement it, considering it's only really a feature request and not a critical problem. Perhaps what we need is something like Ipblocklist, but to show protected pages. VoABot keeps WP:PP updated well enough, but a special page would be a better solution. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

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Kusma

5:11 p.m.

On 10/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've just gone and removed semi-protections from about a dozen user talk pages. All of them were targets of vandalism in the past, generally due to their own anti-vandalism efforts. The pages included pages of administrators. For obvious reasons, anyone who is warning and blocking new users in turn needs to be able to be contacted by these users with questions, concerns, etc. Semi-protection must not be used in this fashion, and I've removed the line supporting it from the semi-protection policy.

I like Ryulong's solution: He is a prolific vandal-fighter whose talk page is sprotected (so discussion with logged in users is not disrupted by frequent vandalism) but he has an extra talk page at [[User talk:Ryulong/Unprotected]] that IPs can use. This eliminates most vandalism from his ordinary talk page but still allows communication from anyone. Kusma

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