Why isn't freezing the topic and the talk page worth discussing? Banning is personal. Freezing the discussion for a day, week, or month is impersonal.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan 88
Good question - I tried just that I almost lost my sysop status.
For what it's worth, I'm with Tom and Mav that freezing an article really isn't that drastic an action, and might be a good thing now and then. After all, it's trivially reversible, and it allows the affected parties to still engage in discussion on talk pages. Yes, uneditable pages are very anti-wiki, but as long as it's understood that a particular lock is a temporary "cooling off" measure, I think it may serve the cause. And we should periodically review the locked pages and unlock many of them if there's no specific reason not to.
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