On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
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?
These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the
number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of
semi-protected articles, then:
P(now) << P(a year ago)
That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that:
P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago)
That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has
not increased.
We should verify both these claims. I'm a little bit wary in
particular because articles are *never* protected for more than a week
or so at a time, whereas we now have several *permanently*
semi-protected articles. You could not claim that the level of
openness for articles like [[George W Bush]] has increased, for
instance.
Comparing
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages…
against
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages
I think these claims may be in trouble. Now, I haven't taken into
account the increase in total number of pages in this time. But, it's
easy to see that the total number of pages protected a year ago was
about 1.5 pages, whereas currently it's about 2.5 pages, with nearly
another 3.5 pages semi-protected. So, you're talking 6 pages of
entries of semi or full protected pages (yes, an imprecise measure)
compared to 1.5 pages. Has the number of pages gone up 4x in that
period (~370 days)? I doubt it.
Steve