On 6/17/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/17/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
For the record, the Einstein article was only protected recently because a stubborn editor was insisting on changing the formatting to meet his own personal requirements and was revert warring. However after a week of this he finally agreed to stop after he was instructed as to how to modify his own monobook.css to make it display for him how he wanted to. It is currently unprotected.
Why was an article protected to stop a *single editor* from modifying it? Wouldn't banning him from the article (and blocking him from Wikipedia if he failed to respect the ban) have been more effective?
Probably. But as you know, there are many ways these things play out, and in the end the article was successfully unprotected after seven days without any difficulties in this respect. IMO the "right answer" is usually any solution which ends up resolving the immediate problem and doesn't create new long-term problems, so in this case I think it worked out fine.
In any case, it was not protected as a result of any of the reasons the reporter discussed in the NYT article, and is not under long-term semi-protection at all. Its inclusion in the article is somewhat gratuitous—the reporter clearly did not investigate the details of its protection status and just grabbed its title from a list somewhere (a small crime in comparison with the more fundamental misrepresentations in the article, of course).
FF