[WikiEN-l] Putting some perspective on the end of Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Tony Sidaway<tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm undertaking to have all article and talk page semiprotections on
> Wikipedia reviewed.  The process I'm using is to enter a brief
> proposal on the article talk page and contact the protecting sysop.
> The idea is that we discuss whether to unprotect the article or talk
> page and watch it vigilantly.
>
> This has already met considerable success, with more 30% of the
> proposals I've made this evening being enacted upon.  There appear to
> be a lot of semiprotections that have simply been forgotten by the
> original sysop.
>
> I'll keep this up until I either run out of articles to review or get
> bored.  Since there are several thousand semiprotected article the
> latter is more likely to happen first.
>
> Gwern Branwen wonders whether semiprotections have taken over from
> protections.  Well one cannot really compare the current Wikipedia
> with the Wikipedia of 2005.  Then we had no real way of dealing with
> biographies of living persons, and little awareness of the problem,
> and as for the protected articles, they numbered dozens at the most,
> and certainly not thousands.  It's important to strike a balance.
> While many of the semiprotected pages may actually be redirects that
> we wouldn't normally want to see edited by unregistered users, I
> suspect many are not.  It's always a good idea to review the situation
> regularly.

Excellent idea.  Some problem areas just are and will remain so, but a
lot of problems were one particular set of editors beating on each
other and not a general social or topic issue.  Those go away over
time.

Thanks for the effort in doing that, Tony.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com