[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

Tue Jun 20 22:17:11 UTC 2006

On 6/20/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> He means that disputed articles that would have had to have been fully
> protected, can now be semiprotected. That way more people (not just
> admins) can edit the article, while potentially culling the problem.
> Correct me if I'm wrong. --LV

I'm being somewhat Socratic here, but how do we decide when an article "has
to" be protected? Who decides? Does giving admins yet another power increase
the divide between admins and everyone else? To what degree is that a
problem? Does giving admins more tools give them more responsibility for
policing, making the average user less responsible? Etc. There are actually
some complicated questions here.

An imperfect analogy can be seen in 9/11 -- all the glorious powers and
authority of the military and uniformed security people and official
communications methods did nothing, but the unarmed passengers with
cellphones and friends and family found out what happened and acted
collectively to try to stop Flight 93. In some situations an elite police
force is less optimal than expecting everybody to pull their weight.