On 6/17/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Since no one else has pointed it out, here's their "correction":
A front-page headline on Saturday with an article about the online
reference work Wikipedia referred imprecisely to its "anyone can edit"
guidelines, which have always restricted changes in a small percentage
of articles. While Wikipedia has indeed added a category of articles
that are "semi-protected" from editing, it has not "revised" its
policy or otherwise put additional restrictions on editing; it says
the change is intended to reduce the number of entries on which
editing is banned altogether.
--
I'm not sure what our '"anyone can edit" guidelines' are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction ?
I am uncomfortable with saying "the change is intended to reduce the
number of entries on which editing is banned altogether" - in
practice, I think it's used on many articles where people just get
sick of cleaning up the vandalism by hand, and the threshold for use
is probably lower than the threshold for using full protection. It's a
perfectly acceptable compromise to me, but we should be honest about
it.
I also note there is very little at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-protection or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy which
explictly says that semi-protection is intended to improve openness or
"anyone can edit"-ness.
There is also a link to a post from Jimbo a few months ago, which
includes this quote:
"2. A great many minor bios of slightly well known but controversial
individuals are subject to POV pushing trolling, including vandalism,
and it seems likely that in such cases, not enough people have these on
their personal watchlists to police them as well as we would like.
Semi-protection would at least eliminate the drive-by nonsense that we
see so often."
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-May/046883.html
That seems to support the notion that semi-protection should be used
in cases where previously no protection at all applied.
Is my conscience pricking me unnecessarily?
Steve