On 8 June 2012 12:38, Andrew West andrewcwest@gmail.com wrote:
After my experience on Saturday, when my daughter went to the featured article of the day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II) and was greeted by large pornographic images injected into the article through unprotected templates, if I were were in charge of a library or a school I would be very hesitant about linking to Wikipedia from my institute's main page. I know that episodes like this are an unavoidable consequence of the Wikipedia editing model, and that you can never entirely eliminate the possibility of offensive vandalism reaching high profile pages, but it always makes me feel a little uneasy that we are so keen to promote Wikipedia that we sometimes forget that Wikipedia is a potentially risky site.
A while back, I proposed semi-protection of low-use redirects. Redirect and template vandalism is one of those things where (if we don't have pending changes/flagged revs), there's a real potential for someone to change it and nobody to notice for months. I fixed a redirect that someone had vandalised and which had been left for months.
The argument against either semi-pp or pending changes on those kinds of pages is "but, anyone can edit, anyone should be able to edit!"
Which is fine, but when we're talking about obscure templates and redirects, I can't quite see any great loss when they aren't available for editing by IPs.