In message 20070329142331.67973.qmail@web63508.mail.re1.yahoo.com, bobolozo bobolozo-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org writes
[[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.
Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like to argue that we should be neither afraid of semi-protecting articles, nor ashamed of doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it, and for historical reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams and players - a field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding amount of vandalism. The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no longer possible to assure the quality of articles through simple reversion - it's just happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I semi-protected [[Wayne Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15 months, and I suggest interested people take a look at that articles' edit history before and after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users was incessant before protection, but the semi-protection has not prevented the article from being constructively edited since then, while I think I'm correct in saying we've had nothing that would be construed as out-and-out vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most recent bout of semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having so much vandalism that a major piece of vandalism - the player's middle name, in large font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an incorrect state for no less than 54 hours.
It's time to recognise that there are whole classes of articles - sports players and teams, for example - which attract a large amount of attention from particularly immature non-logged-in editors, and that these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a virtually permanent basis. The requirement to have had a registered user for a few days before editing does discourage the great majority of drive-by vandals, and does not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.
I should add that I take a "robust" attitude to vandal non-logged-in users: 1 warning on the talk page, then I can sometimes be quite merciless with repeat vandals with regard to giving a long-term block; also if they've clocked up a "final warning" from someone else, then the next time they vandalise they don't get another warning, they get blocked - no messing around; in three and a half years as an admin, I've never had a complaint about my activities.