[WikiEN-l] Semiprotection and [[George W. Bush]] (was The Counter Vandalism Unit? Whaa?)

Fri Feb 3 13:50:44 UTC 2006

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Although vandalism has been slashed by semi-protection on that
>article, non-vandalism edits also seem to be down by about 60%.  Does
>that mean that semi-protection is wrong for George W. Bush?  I think
>the jury is still out, but it appears that there is considerable
>collateral damage associated with semi-protection.

As examples of bad cases making bad rules, [[George W. Bush]] is the
winner. It is *the* most edited article on en.wikipedia, by what? 5:1
over the next one? It pretty clearly has *too many* editors for the
live version ever to be a usable encyclopaedia article.

Remember that *most articles are not controversial*. And that Kim
Bruning and Gmaxwell's data indicates there are only a couple of
hundred articles out of 900,000 that have more than a hundred editors.
Kim's idea that we should just declare those couple of hundred
articles prima facie pathological until proven otherwise strikes me as
an *excellent* one.

Saying anything about the value of semiprotection based on such
articles only really applies to such articles. And semiprotection
should be thought of as an extreme measure, but [[George W. Bush]] is
a pathological article.

- d.