Tim Starling wrote:
It's true that you could make minor changes to formatting, but those changes do not provide enough benefit to counteract the waste of time and resources caused by vandalism.
I totally agree and I think what Angela said is valid here as well: this type of page isn't all that suited for a wiki, so we should have really no qualms about just protecting the page and being done with it.
I'd say the same thing about a *lot* of things on wikisource. At some point fairly early in the development of a source article, protection is a wise option. Probably the protection message should make it very clear to people that if they have a real change to make, the article can easily be unprotected.
But it seems silly for anyone to have to pull their hair out fighting vandalism on a page that *could not possibly* be improved anyway, because it is already accurate.
--Jimbo