--- dpbsmith@verizon.net schrieb:
If we start getting a lot of pages that are protected for this reason, I am afraid we will see creative bad behavior that is intended to bypass this protection. In order not to stimulate such behavior I will not give examples of some possibilities that occur to me.
Yes, I agree. This is probable, but I am not sure that this would be worse than the current situation. Maybe a later counterstep would have to be some screening and/or delayed appearance of new articles, or maybe such a solution would turn out to be unnecessary. It's hard to know in advance.
I suggest we ask the developers for a way to "soft-protect" pages.
It's reassuring to see another constructive proposal to discuss. It seems, to me, to be an efficient approach; much more efficient than discussing solutions for singular problematic pages one after another, as the proposed making two parallell articles of the Gdansk article, which isn't really what I hope for.
This proposal does also seem to be relatively easy to implement, although of course not as easy as using the now working procedures for protection of pages.
A "soft-protected" page could be edited by anyone, but would require some annoying, time-consuming and (wishful thinking) thought-provoking steps to be performed first.
For example, if you get to a soft-protected page by any usual route and click "edit this page," it might take you to a screen that explains that the subject is contentious. The only option to proceed takes you, not to the article's Edit box, but to the article's Talk page.
Does it help against determined editors of the type of our Polish friends or their extremist pro-German counterparts, or, to hang on to the Pinochet example, of the type of Wik, 172 and VV?
Please understand that I'm not intending to point out these individuals. I dislike some typical habits of theirs, not really them personally. Many other valuable contributors show more or less of the same un-cooperative and un-civilized behavior, and it would be good if we could curb this kind of behavior in order to avoid situations where the misbehaving individuals ultimately produced angry mobs pushing them out of Wikipedia.
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