[WikiEN-l] Proposal: limited extension of semi-protection policy

[Delirium]

The Cunctator wrote:

>On 5/19/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Semi-protection seems to be a great success in many cases.  I think that
>>it should be extended, but carefully, in a couple of key ways.
>>
>>1.  It seems that some very high profile articles like [[George W.
>>Bush]] are destined to be semi-protected all the time or nearly all the
>>time.  I support continued occassional experimention by anyone who wants
>>to take the responsibility of guarding it, but it seems likely to me
>>that we will keep such articles semi-protected almost continuously.
>>
>>If that is true, then the template at the time is misleading and scary
>>and distracting to readers.  I propose that we eliminate the requirement
>>that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the
>>general public.  They can be categorized as necessary, of course, so
>>that editors who take an interest in making sure things are not
>>excessively semi-protected can do so, but there seems to me to be little
>>benefit in announcing it to the entire world in such a confusing fashion.
>>    
>>
>
>
>If the template is distracting, it should be replaced by a less distracting
>template, not removed entirely.
>  
>
I think it doesn't make sense to have it at the top, because it 
unnecessarily forces people who only want to read to take notice of 
things specific to editing.

In other cases where templates are put at the top, they're of relevance 
to people who are there as pure readers---for example, if an article 
doesn't cite its sources, or needs cleanup, or is of disputed 
neutrality, these are things relevant both to editors, who should fix 
them, but also to readers, who should be aware of the problem and take 
it into account when reading/interpreting the article.  Semi-protection, 
by contrast, is of basically no interest to someone who just wants to 
read the article.

-Mark