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

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."