On 6/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/17/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
For the record, the Einstein article was only
protected recently
because a stubborn editor was insisting on changing the formatting to
meet his own personal requirements and was revert warring. However
after a week of this he finally agreed to stop after he was instructed
as to how to modify his own monobook.css to make it display for him
how he wanted to. It is currently unprotected.
Why was an article protected to stop a *single editor* from modifying
it? Wouldn't banning him from the article (and blocking him from
Wikipedia if he failed to respect the ban) have been more effective?
Probably. But as you know, there are many ways these things play out,
and in the end the article was successfully unprotected after seven
days without any difficulties in this respect. IMO the "right answer"
is usually any solution which ends up resolving the immediate problem
and doesn't create new long-term problems, so in this case I think it
worked out fine.
In any case, it was not protected as a result of any of the reasons
the reporter discussed in the NYT article, and is not under long-term
semi-protection at all. Its inclusion in the article is somewhat
gratuitous—the reporter clearly did not investigate the details of its
protection status and just grabbed its title from a list somewhere (a
small crime in comparison with the more fundamental misrepresentations
in the article, of course).
FF