Luna wrote:
Auto-expiring protection sounds like a very interesting idea -- has anybody submitted this to Bugzilla?
On 11/12/06, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 11/13/06, James Hare messedrocker@gmail.com wrote:
I believe it's been brought up to use an edit-approval program where new accounts would have to get their edits approved if they're new -- this
would
be in place of semiprotection.
I oppose this. It undermines the assumption of good faith, whereas S-P is specifically used on pages that have a record of vandalism.
It makes more sense to expand the protection model to allow for auto-expiry (as well as automatic labeling of protected pages). -- Peace & Love, Erik
Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
This should be possible using a couple templates and a bot. Automatically-expiring templates like [[Template:Prod]] can place an article in an "expired" category after awhile, and a bot (or human) can go through and unprotect them. The subst:'d semi-protection template could take a parameter that determines how quickly the article is placed into this category, and I'd imagine that you could use the #time: function to give this parameter the same flexibility as the length field in [[Special:Blockip]].
I guess it'd be possible for a user to come in later and modify the expiration date in the article's source code, but since that would require the user to be unaffected by the semi-protection, they shouldn't have an incentive to do so. Maybe sysops could compare the original semiprotect parameter to the current one when unprotecting the page, in case that parameter gets tampered with.