[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

Tue Jun 20 22:54:11 UTC 2006

The Cunctator wrote:
>> But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for
>> semi-protection.  It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more
>> open than before, when we only had the tool of protection.  But it is
>> not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.
> 
> A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean
> by "more open" here? What's the metric?

Under full protection, no one was able to edit, except for admins, and
by social custom, admins were not to edit except for in certain very
minor ways.  In effect, even for articles where there was major breaking
news, the articles had to be kept closed.

Under semi-protection, we have been able to relax this.  Anonymous ip
numbers and accounts less than 4 days old can not edit, but anyone else
can.  This has proven to be remarkably effective in preserving both the
ability of people of good will of diverse viewpoints to join the
dialogue, and the exclusion of random driveby vandalism.

I think that semi-protection could be improved.  We recently had a good
conversation here about how to change the user interface around it to
make it less off-putting and more inviting for people to participate.

If random people writing "George Bush is a poopy head" are excluded from
an article, but people of various legitimate (though often wrong, say,
or different from mine, or whatever) opinions can participate, where
before, BOTH groups were excluded, then I think that is a net win for
openness.

I would be happy to see full protection go away completely.  It still
exists at the moment, and it does serve some purpose, namely as a
"cooling off period" type of thing, which is often softer and more open
than dragging people before an ArbCom proceeding to ban them.

I think there should be no articles which are full-protected for more
than a day or two (with of course reasonable exceptions for unusual
circumstances), and I think that there are probably many articles which
should be semi-protected for a fairly longish period of time.  (Where we
have repeated driveby trolling for example.)

I also think that a "stable version" approach is much better than
protection, in the sense that if done well, then we can leave a lot of
things unprotected, knowing that the random vandalism will never hit the
"public page" anyway.

--Jimbo

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