[WikiEN-l] userpage and user subpage protection

Mon Jul 25 19:21:37 UTC 2005

It may not be controversial as much as off topic.
"Protection" is an issue for sysops alone, almost
exclusively to provide for stability for pages which
may be too much in flux--from vandalism to POV wars.
Protection is something that is frowned upon as
"unwiki", as if one sought to add secrecy or privacy
to parts of Wikipedia. To distinguish subpages from
other pages would require some software hacks,
("Please DIY") and otherwise would still present a
wikiethical issue. 

Further, protection may be associated with page
visiblity, and "blacklists" to keep certain pages
"private" (software currenly allows for system
whitelists). While privacy might be nice on Wikinews
for example, to emulate private "journalistic
conference" for "scoop" discussions between editors
and writers, I doubt that even subpage protection will
happen on Wikipedia, aside from system stuff like
monobook.css, etc. You can make your notes as  on there, if you want, but they
will still be visible. ;)

In general, its been principle to keep things open,
open, and open, though probably nobody would complain
if you became a sysop and protected your own subpages.

SV

--- Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:

> I know that there have been discussions about this
> in the past and that 
> this subject has been controversial, however for the
> life of me I have 
> not been able to find a full discussion on this so I
> thought I'd ask 
> here what the whole issue is with subpage and
> userpage protection and 
> why is it so controversial and disputed?
> 
> -Jtkiefer
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> 

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