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

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> But, she has a stalker.
>
> The stalker posts longwinded ranting criticisms and insults of her.

After posting them to his blog, he adds them to Wikipedia. That, at
least, seems to be the usual way in which we receive these
"criticisms", which makes it rather easy to justify removing them. I
have yet to see the case where the _community_, after looking into a
matter, has erred on the side of inclusion of bad, incoherent
material. It sometimes happens that small groups build a consensus to
accept certain material, but once it receives community attention, I
think our processes generally work fine.

Semi-protection together with listing a page in a well-watched
category is a perfectly fine method for dealing with problem articles
and, as has been stated many times, much preferable to the hard
protection which we would likely be using instead for the same purpose
if semi-protection didn't exist. It's a community method which is open
to all serious existing contributors, and reasonably open to new ones
(they just have to wait a few days).

The only thing we need to be cautious about is silent creep of
permanently semi-protected pages, not out of maliciousness, but simply
because people forget to unprotect, esp. after the label is removed.
Maintenance categories and the like can hopefully take care of that,
though.

Erik