On Friday 06 September 2002 10:01 pm, Brion VIBBER wrote:
Freezing articles is the very height of anti-wiki -- not only can't the warring parties contribute, *no one* can contribute to the article in question except the sysop "cabal".
The whole point is to stop edit wars by forcing a truce. Edit wars in my opinion /are/ a form of highly directed vandalism and need to be stopped (they sap user resources in a similar way as bold-faced systemic vandalism).
The only other 'meta' function we have is to block an individual (usually a kook who is fighting with several sane-minded Wikipedians) -- which in my world is /a lot/ more morally repugnant than temporarily protecting a page (we are also talking about ways to lower kook fatigue aren't we?).
Nobody is proposing that the articles be protected forever - just temporarily so that the parties can cool down (and hopefully the kook go away -- they often feed on attention and controversy in the same way trolls do).
I've said enough about this already (and with the new wording on the Main Page we would be lying if any /articles/ were actually protected --- without another caveat, of course).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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