[Wikipedia-l] Protected pages

[Brion VIBBER]

Tom Parmenter wrote:
> Why isn't freezing the topic and the talk page worth discussing?
> Banning is personal.  Freezing the discussion for a day, week, or
> month is impersonal.  

Freezing articles is the very height of anti-wiki -- not only can't the 
warring parties contribute, *no one* can contribute to the article in 
question except the sysop "cabal". (And what if one party to the dispute 
*is* a sysop, as seems to happen not infrequently?)

The only reason the main page is frozen is to discourage petty vandalism 
on our front door. (And the main page, I will point out, is not an 
encyclopedia article.)

Which reminds me... here's my periodic sweep of all the articles 
currently frozen:

[[Main_Page]]
   See above.

[[Seneca]]
   There's no justification for this in its very light edit history. No 
talk page. I assume some sysop hit the "protect" link by mistake...? 
I've unprotected it.

[[Titulus_Regius]]
   Isis protected it, giving as justification in the talk page that it 
contains a source text. I've unprotected it, as it is ultimately an 
_article_, large citation or no large citation. There are better ways to 
create and reference an uneditable document if you want to, and none of 
them include blocking out edit access to encyclopedia articles.

[[Wikipedia:Upload_log]]
[[Wikipedia:Deletion_log]]
[[Wikipedia:Blocked_IPs]]
   Auto-maintained log pages that should not be manually edited.

[[Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License]]
   We need to have a copy of the license in the work, and that 
definitely shouldn't be editable! Note that this is *not* an 
encyclopedia article, unlike [[Titulus Regius]]. The article *about* the 
GFDL is freely editable.


[[Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not]]
[[Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view]]
[[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
[[Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines]]
[[Wikipedia:IP_probation_watchlist]]
[[Wikipedia:Most_common_Wikipedia_faux_pas]]
[[Wikipedia:Policy_on_permanent_deletion_of_pages]]
[[Wikipedia:Naming_conventions]]
[[Wikipedia:Administrators]]
[[Wikipedia:Policy]]
[[Wikipedia:Database_queries]]
   Various policy and help pages. I'm a lot more leery of these being 
protected, but again they're not encyclopedia articles so it's not 
_completely_ anti-the-whole-point-of-the-exercise.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)