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

[Risker]

Tony is right that these lists of long-term and indefinitely protected or
semi-protected pages should be reviewed periodically. The place to find this
information is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports

There are about 3000 indefinitely permanently protected talk pages; they are
almost all user talk pages and were protected at the time that the account
was blocked. Most of those can be unprotected. They run back to 2006.

There are 39 indefinitely fully protected article titles, the vast majority
of which are soft redirects to Wiktionary or pages salted to prevent
recreation. For the others, most are quite recent, and it would probably be
appropriate to ask the protecting admin to review and, at minimum, set an
end-date.  In addition, there are 1478 indefinitely protected redirects,
many of them to prevent forking.

There are 1900+ indefinitely semiprotected articles, with many of them
indicating they have been repeated vandalism targets. These include articles
on recent US presidents, certain high profile musicians, politically charged
subjects, and those with a wide and opinionated fandom. These should, of
course, be periodically reviewed; however, if someone decides to unprotect
many of these articles, I would hope they don't just keep it on their
watchlist but actively review new edits regularly for a few weeks afterward.


There are also 300+ indefinitely semiprotected redirects, which include
repeatedly recreated articles previously deemed inappropriate, and titles
associted with attempts to fork articles. These might bear review as well,
either with a move up to full protection or semiprotection lifted on a trial
basis, but again they would need to be monitored closely if they are
unprotected.

Of the approximately 400 talk pages and talk page redirects that are
indefinitely semi-protected, almost all are user talk pages, many of admins
who carry out antivandal work. There were about 30 article talk pages
indefinitely semi-protected before Tony carried out his review, and there
are quite a bit fewer now.

There are some opportunities to improve practices here, and to really take a
look and decide which articles (and rarely, article talk pages) need this
indefinite protection. At the same time, I really do believe that if an
admin is going to reduce protection on a page with an extensive history of
problems, he or she has a responsibility to keep an eye on the page for at
least a couple of weeks afterward to ensure there isn't a fresh outbreak of
inappropriate behaviour. Since so many of the articles involved are BLPs,
and even on non-BLPs the problems were related to inappropriate addition of
information about LPs, this is an area where special sensitivity is
required.

Risker