[WikiEN-l] More concerns about wide scale article protection

[bobolozo]

[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most
viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.

9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are
currently semi-protected.  Of the 5 that aren't, 2
have been sprotected for major portions of the last
month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and
only one has never been protected.

In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and
you'll find the article is sprotected.  God, Satan,
Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on.  Any major
topic you look at, if they're not protected currently,
they have been recently.

We seem to be sliding towards a policy of
semi-protecting all high traffic articles.

I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by
requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both
protected again.  In looking at those who vandalized
those pages, what I found is that almost all of them
vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.

My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles
does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism
- it just spreads it around.  Instead of messing up
our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular
ones and mess those up instead.

I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all
popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it
makes life easier for the editors who watch those
articles.  The rather more substantial negative side
to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have
certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and
moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit
for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.

I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of
sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it
basically makes no sense.  If we aren't going to let
new editors edit articles, we might as well just come
out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the
whole database.


 
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