[WikiEN-l] 172--what happened

Tue Apr 1 03:10:00 UTC 2003

> I am not going to justify protecting the page. Rather, I will relate my
> perspective as to what happened.

Danny,

your description of 172's behavior is correct, and it took much patience  
to get him to accept a compromise. Regardless, we need to maintain the  
sysop/editor distinction -- protecting pages should only be done

1) in cases of obvious vandalism,
2) in an edit war, by an *impartial* third party.

It's similar to page deletion: Sysops are supposed to put pages that they  
want deleted (except vandalism) on the "Votes for deletion" page and let  
someone else flush them. A sysop in an edit war should contact another  
sysop and ask them to protect the page, as a time out measure for all  
parties involved.

For the two of us, it is obvious that 172 behaved incorrectly, but for an  
outsider, it may look like an abuse of power. That's why we need to  
maintain a process that minimizes the potential for such abuse.

Regards,

Erik