On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
If there are actually cases where articles that were previously protected are now semi-protected. Except that article weren't really ever permanently protected in the first place.
One of the previous rules about protected articles was that *no one* was supposed to edit them, including the admins who were technically able to edit them. I'm sure you could slant that as another gain for openness, though. Is allowing only admins to edit more or less open than allowing no one to edit?
These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of semi-protected articles, then: P(now) << P(a year ago) That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that: P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago) That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has not increased.
We should verify both these claims. I'm a little bit wary in particular because articles are *never* protected for more than a week or so at a time, whereas we now have several *permanently* semi-protected articles. You could not claim that the level of openness for articles like [[George W Bush]] has increased, for instance.
Comparing http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages&...
against
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages
I think these claims may be in trouble. Now, I haven't taken into account the increase in total number of pages in this time. But, it's easy to see that the total number of pages protected a year ago was about 1.5 pages, whereas currently it's about 2.5 pages, with nearly another 3.5 pages semi-protected. So, you're talking 6 pages of entries of semi or full protected pages (yes, an imprecise measure) compared to 1.5 pages. Has the number of pages gone up 4x in that period (~370 days)? I doubt it.
Steve