[Wikipedia-l] Protected pages

Sat Sep 7 06:39:45 UTC 2002

On Friday 06 September 2002 10:01 pm, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> 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".

The whole point is to stop edit wars by forcing a truce. Edit wars in my 
opinion /are/ a form of highly directed vandalism and need to be stopped 
(they sap user resources in a similar way as bold-faced systemic vandalism). 

The only other 'meta' function we have is to block an individual (usually a 
kook who is fighting with several sane-minded Wikipedians) -- which in my 
world is /a lot/ more morally repugnant than temporarily protecting a page 
(we are also talking about ways to lower kook fatigue aren't we?).

Nobody is proposing that the articles be protected forever - just temporarily 
so that the parties can cool down (and hopefully the kook go away -- they 
often feed on attention and controversy in the same way trolls do). 

I've said enough about this already (and with the new wording on the Main 
Page we would be lying if any /articles/ were actually protected --- without 
another caveat, of course).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)