[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia page protection report
Anthere
anthere9 at yahoo.com
Wed Sep 14 16:53:56 UTC 2005
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Today I decided to analyze in more detail to what extent articles across
> Wikipedias remain protected for long periods of time. The report is at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005
>
> (To developers: The script I used is 'logprot.pl' in my home directory.
> It may be desirable to make this available as a special page, if someone
> can figure out a way to make the query scale.)
>
> It shows all pages in all language Wikipedias that have been protected
> for more than 14 days. Note that, by the time you look at it, some of
> the pages in it may have been unprotected already.
>
> The Wikipedias with the most such protected pages are (article rank in
> parentheses):
>
> German - 253 (2)
> Japanese - 165 (4)
> English - 138 (1)
> Italian - 19 (5)
> French - 15 (3)
> Spanish - 13 (10)
>
> This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used
> excessively on the German Wikipedia. It is quite striking that many,
> many controversial articles have been protected for months. For example,
> articles about veganism, sex, democracy, abortion, astrology, Karlheinz
> Deschner (famous atheist writer), Silvio Gesell (controversial
> economist) and his Freiwirtschaft theory, Gorleben (controversial
> nuclear waste disposal site), and Egon Krenz (East German politician)
> have been protected since July. Articles about child sexual abuse and
> pedophilia have been protected since April 2005 and March 2005,
> respectively. Notably, in the child sexual abuse case, the article was
> also cut down from 54,000 characters to 2,000 before being protected,
> making it effectively useless -- a rather drastic measure to deal with
> ongoing controversies.
>
> The longest protected articles appear to be related to German student
> corporations. The record holder is [[de:Schmiss]], which has been
> protected since January after a neutrality dispute.
>
> Perhaps ironically, even the article about Wikipedia itself has been
> protected since August 25.
>
> Note that the local policy on protection, at
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seitensperrung and
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administratoren , is not unusal
> and recommends only short protections except for very high exposure
> pages like the Main Page, or unimportant pages like redirects which are
> frequently vandalized. This raises the question why no bold admin has
> unprotected these articles yet.
>
> I cannot say anything about the protection patterns on the Japanese
> Wikipedia, which is the only one which stands out besides English and
> German. The long term protections on the English Wikipedia appear to be
> mostly accidental. When someone notices that a page has been protected
> for very long, it is generally quickly unprotected.
>
> Across languages, possibly with the exception of Japanese, the German
> Wikipedia is alone in the pattern of locking down controversial articles
> for months. Protected articles also seem to not be tagged as such, so
> that visitors do not see a reason for the protection on the page (a
> visible marker might also encourage sysops to unprotect the page).
>
> One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
> relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
> information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
> they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
> beyond the articles concerned.
>
> I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing
> complexity:
>
> * limit protections by policy
> * add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in
> the article namespace
> * add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
>
> I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with.
>
> Best,
>
> Erik
Interesting...
One point which does not seem factual to me in your report, but possibly
only an interpretation is
"> One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
> relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
> information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
> they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
> beyond the articles concerned."
This is only true if there is no social norm forbidding a sysop to edit
a protected page. At least, on the english and french wikipedia, I do
think the rule of no-edit on a protected page exist. Maybe not on all
projects ? Can you from your data gather such an information ? I mean,
are there situations when a long-protected article actually grow and
evolve during the protection ?
Ant
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