It may not be controversial as much as off topic. "Protection" is an issue for sysops alone, almost exclusively to provide for stability for pages which may be too much in flux--from vandalism to POV wars. Protection is something that is frowned upon as "unwiki", as if one sought to add secrecy or privacy to parts of Wikipedia. To distinguish subpages from other pages would require some software hacks, ("Please DIY") and otherwise would still present a wikiethical issue. Further, protection may be associated with page visiblity, and "blacklists" to keep certain pages "private" (software currenly allows for system whitelists). While privacy might be nice on Wikinews for example, to emulate private "journalistic conference" for "scoop" discussions between editors and writers, I doubt that even subpage protection will happen on Wikipedia, aside from system stuff like monobook.css, etc. You can make your notes as <!-- hidden comments --> on there, if you want, but they will still be visible. ;) In general, its been principle to keep things open, open, and open, though probably nobody would complain if you became a sysop and protected your own subpages. SV --- Jtkiefer &lt;jtkiefer(a)wordzen.net&gt; wrote: __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

In general, its been principle to keep things open, open, and open, though probably nobody would complain if you became a sysop and protected your own subpages.

In practice, though, users are generally considered to "own" their user pages. If someone edited my user page, I would probably move their comments to my talk page, and this seems to be standard practice---a user's user page is only for them to edit, barring extenuating circumstances such as the user being banned. -Mark

What you are saying is true, People do generally feel they own thier user page. But it's very unwiki and not something to be encoraged by allowing admins to protect their user pages. I allow people to edit my user page. So does Jimbo, So do several others. Theresa _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Yeah, you do so - but as I have noticed on multiple occasions reading your own userpage, you freely use your admin powers to lock yours down whenever someone is defacing your user page. Ordinary users don't have that right. Their options are to request getting it locked and wind up having to beg an admin to lock it, wait for them to edit, and then relock it whenever they make changes or else constantly revert the vandalism.

I can see why locking your userpage and userpage subpages is counter wiki, but I think that an exception to this would be things like monobook.css and monobook.js since they are a real pain to fix if a vandal wants to continually vandalize them and even then the page shouldn't be permanately protected.

open, complain subpages. Actually, they would. Protection is meant as a defense against persistent vandalism, not as a reward for admins. If you want a non-editable page, please don't use a wiki. I see no reason user pages need to be protected any more than any other page. You don't own these pages just because you created them in the user namespace. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership> and

Angela. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

steve v wrote: allowing for is There's always Email. Not everything to do with the wiki has to happen on the wiki, does it? -humblefool _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l