--- dpbsmith(a)verizon.net schrieb:
If we start getting a lot of pages that
are protected for this reason, I am
afraid we will see creative bad behavior
that is intended to bypass this protection.
In order not to stimulate such behavior
I will not give examples of some
possibilities that occur to me.
Yes, I agree. This is probable, but I am not sure that
this would be worse than the current situation.
Maybe a later counterstep would have to be some
screening and/or delayed appearance of new articles,
or maybe such a solution would turn out to be
unnecessary. It's hard to know in advance.
I suggest we ask the developers for a way to
"soft-protect" pages.
It's reassuring to see another constructive proposal
to discuss. It seems, to me, to be an efficient
approach; much more efficient than discussing
solutions for singular problematic pages one after
another, as the proposed making two parallell articles
of the Gdansk article, which isn't really what I hope
for.
This proposal does also seem to be relatively easy to
implement, although of course not as easy as using the
now working procedures for protection of pages.
A "soft-protected" page could be edited by
anyone,
but would require some annoying, time-consuming
and (wishful thinking) thought-provoking steps to
be performed first.
For example, if you get to a soft-protected page
by any usual route and click "edit this page,"
it might take you to a screen that explains that
the subject is contentious. The only option to
proceed takes you, not to the article's Edit box,
but to the article's Talk page.
Does it help against determined editors of the type of
our Polish friends or their extremist pro-German
counterparts, or, to hang on to the Pinochet example,
of the type of Wik, 172 and VV?
Please understand that I'm not intending to point out
these individuals. I dislike some typical habits of
theirs, not really them personally. Many other
valuable contributors show more or less of the same
un-cooperative and un-civilized behavior, and it would
be good if we could curb this kind of behavior in
order to avoid situations where the misbehaving
individuals ultimately produced angry mobs pushing
them out of Wikipedia.
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