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

[Phil Nash]

Tony Sidaway 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.

I agree that indefinite semi-protection is inimical to the purpose of the 
encyclopedia and should be subject to periodical review, so I regard this as 
a beneficial initiative. I wonder, however, how many of those articles are 
then edited by (a) editors who set up accounts and become auto-confirmed in 
order to do so, or (b) subject of {{editprotected}} requests on their talk 
pages. I took a quick look the other day at the categories of unsourced 
articles, which go back to December 2006; to be honest, I don't currently 
have the time or will myself to trawl through what is a Sisyphean task. Even 
limiting that to BLP articles is more than enough to tax the stamina of most 
volunteer editors. It's easy enough to begin a stub, and as easy to tag as 
unsourced, but it does take some commitment to take the bricks and fashion a 
mansion, which I think we should be doing.