Today I decided to analyze in more detail to what extent articles across
Wikipedias remain protected for long periods of time. The report is at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005
(To developers: The script I used is 'logprot.pl' in my home directory.
It may be desirable to make this available as a special page, if someone
can figure out a way to make the query scale.)
It shows all pages in all language Wikipedias that have been protected
for more than 14 days. Note that, by the time you look at it, some of
the pages in it may have been unprotected already.
The Wikipedias with the most such protected pages are (article rank in
parentheses):
German - 253 (2)
Japanese - 165 (4)
English - 138 (1)
Italian - 19 (5)
French - 15 (3)
Spanish - 13 (10)
This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used
excessively on the German Wikipedia. It is quite striking that many,
many controversial articles have been protected for months. For example,
articles about veganism, sex, democracy, abortion, astrology, Karlheinz
Deschner (famous atheist writer), Silvio Gesell (controversial
economist) and his Freiwirtschaft theory, Gorleben (controversial
nuclear waste disposal site), and Egon Krenz (East German politician)
have been protected since July. Articles about child sexual abuse and
pedophilia have been protected since April 2005 and March 2005,
respectively. Notably, in the child sexual abuse case, the article was
also cut down from 54,000 characters to 2,000 before being protected,
making it effectively useless -- a rather drastic measure to deal with
ongoing controversies.
The longest protected articles appear to be related to German student
corporations. The record holder is [[de:Schmiss]], which has been
protected since January after a neutrality dispute.
Perhaps ironically, even the article about Wikipedia itself has been
protected since August 25.
Note that the local policy on protection, at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seitensperrung and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administratoren , is not unusal
and recommends only short protections except for very high exposure
pages like the Main Page, or unimportant pages like redirects which are
frequently vandalized. This raises the question why no bold admin has
unprotected these articles yet.
I cannot say anything about the protection patterns on the Japanese
Wikipedia, which is the only one which stands out besides English and
German. The long term protections on the English Wikipedia appear to be
mostly accidental. When someone notices that a page has been protected
for very long, it is generally quickly unprotected.
Across languages, possibly with the exception of Japanese, the German
Wikipedia is alone in the pattern of locking down controversial articles
for months. Protected articles also seem to not be tagged as such, so
that visitors do not see a reason for the protection on the page (a
visible marker might also encourage sysops to unprotect the page).
One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
beyond the articles concerned.
I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing
complexity:
* limit protections by policy
* add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in
the article namespace
* add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with.
Best,
Erik