[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

Wed Jun 21 11:12:19 UTC 2006

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on
> > semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the lovely
> > heading  "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has  added restrictions".
>
> Gee, that is hardly what I have said.  We used to fully protect in cases
> that we now semi-protect.  That's a net gain for openness.
>
If there are actually cases where articles that were previously
protected are now semi-protected.  Except that article weren't really
ever permanently protected in the first place.

One of the previous rules about protected articles was that *no one*
was supposed to edit them, including the admins who were technically
able to edit them.  I'm sure you could slant that as another gain for
openness, though.  Is allowing only admins to edit more or less open
than allowing no one to edit?

> > It's
> > difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest
> > critical analyses of the effects of his policies.
>
> Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for
> years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing
> studies of how semi-protection is used.
>
Then you probably gathered these statistics:  What was the average
time of page protection before semi-protection was implemented?  Now
what is the average time of page protection and the average time of
semi-protection?