[Wikipedia-l] Protected pages

Sat Sep 7 04:46:30 UTC 2002

Brion Wrote:
>Tom Parmenter wrote:
>> Why isn't freezing the topic and the talk page worth discussing?
>> Banning is personal.  Freezing the discussion for a day, week, or
>> month is impersonal.  
>
>Freezing articles is the very height of anti-wiki -- not only can't the 
>warring parties contribute, *no one* can contribute to the article in 
>question except the sysop "cabal". (And what if one party to the dispute 
>*is* a sysop, as seems to happen not infrequently?)

Bigger problems than that--we'd need a new class of protection on articles, because sysops can still protect "protected" articles.  So the result would be to let sysops edit the article and not anyone else.  Wikipedia would face a firestorm of criticism, and for good reason.  (Some clueless sysop who looks a lot like me would probably go in and clean up typos or something, completely ignorant of the surrounding controversy.)

kq