IAC, even if policy isnt prohibitive, the number of sysops on any wiki is an extreme reduction in the available pool of edits in open editing. Unless there is some great liberalization in granting sysop trust, which seems to kind of contradict recent discussion about claimed problems with sysop accountability.
Jamie on Mediawiki-l says that there is some code in 1.5 which AIUI might allow for gradations in page protection (sysops, logged-in, anons etc) --or was he talking about an aspect of the validation /confirmed-version method?
SV
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Anthere:
This is only true if there is no social norm
forbidding a sysop to edit
a protected page. At least, on the english and
french wikipedia, I do
think the rule of no-edit on a protected page
exist. Maybe not on all
projects ? Can you from your data gather such an
information ? I mean,
are there situations when a long-protected article
actually grow and
evolve during the protection ?
I can't automatically check it with the current script, though I could theoretically check for each article how many revisions there have been after the protected one. On the German Wikipedia, the general pattern seems to be that the article simply "dies" after the protection, with the exception of a few minor edits by sysops, like these:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=B%C3%BCrgerrechtsbewegung_Solidari...
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Verlag_Heinz_Heise&diff=676005...
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=P%C3%A4dophilie&diff=6769462&a...
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erich_Honecker&diff=7926076&am...
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vertreibung&diff=9105694&o...
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Egon_Krenz&diff=6801089&ol...
These are often requested on the talk page, and sysops seem to stay away from controversial edits to protected pages. In that way, I don't think the German Wikipedia is fundamentally different from any other, it's just that the number of pages where sysops have to act as gatekeepers for long periods of time is[*] far larger. Speculating, I think this must give a different impression of the role and importance of sysops to newcomers.
[*] For the record, admins Bdk and APPER have now unprotected many of the affected pages on the German Wikipedia. I'll re-run the script in a week and report the results here.
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