[Wikipedia-l] Semi-protection

Mon Nov 20 09:01:43 UTC 2006

Luna wrote:
> Auto-expiring protection sounds like a very interesting idea -- has anybody
> submitted this to  Bugzilla?
> 
> On 11/12/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> On 11/13/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I believe it's been brought up to use an edit-approval program where new
>>> accounts would have to get their edits approved if they're new -- this
>> would
>>> be in place of semiprotection.
>> I oppose this. It undermines the assumption of good faith, whereas S-P
>> is specifically used on pages that have a record of vandalism.
>>
>> It makes more sense to expand the protection model to allow for
>> auto-expiry (as well as automatic labeling of protected pages).
>> --
>> Peace & Love,
>> Erik
>>
>> Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

This should be possible using a couple templates and a bot. 
Automatically-expiring templates like [[Template:Prod]] can place an 
article in an "expired" category after awhile, and a bot (or human) can 
go through and unprotect them. The subst:'d semi-protection template 
could take a parameter that determines how quickly the article is placed 
into this category, and I'd imagine that you could use the #time: 
function to give this parameter the same flexibility as the length field 
in [[Special:Blockip]].

I guess it'd be possible for a user to come in later and modify the 
expiration date in the article's source code, but since that would 
require the user to be unaffected by the semi-protection, they shouldn't 
have an incentive to do so. Maybe sysops could compare the original 
semiprotect parameter to the current one when unprotecting the page, in 
case that parameter gets tampered with.

-- 
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
[[en:User:Mxn]] [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]]
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/