On 8 June 2012 12:38, Andrew West <andrewcwest(a)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.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>