Talk:Page protections considered harmful

BTW Brion, it could be interesting to keep somewhere the history of banning. Meaning, which IP have been banned and when. When they have been unbanned, and by who. Do you see what I mean ?

Agreed. --Brion VIBBER 19:58 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

Ah great. Now the times I have banned myself in order to get real-life work done will be public to all! ;) --mav

Does anyone else think half of this article belongs in its own talk page? --Random832 12:05 June 20, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, she does. --[[User:Eequor|η♀υωρ]] 23:48, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

From en:Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view:

just a note that the essay on neutral point of view states that we should go ahead and edit it, but when i tried (to add a link to quotation marks where the text refers to "scare quotes") i was informed (off to the side) that it was a protected page. someone who can edit this page should remove the line that says we should feel free to edit it, or it should become unprotected. in either case, could someone make the scare-quote link. I'd never heard the term before but its a good one. also, does anyone know the name for the action people some-times do to create "sign-language scare-quotes" like Christ Farley: "in a van down by the river" style?
-Plasticlax

Edit bit removed (for now at least: this page needs help so the creation of a unprotected /Temp page to rework it may be in order). How exactly to you want this link to be displayed? --mav

Why does this page need to be protected? Protection should only be applied to prevent vandalism. Otherwise I see no reason why the wiki process shouldn't work here. --Eloquence

Agree. It appears this page was set a long time ago, and is now carved into stone :-)

I liked Mav comment about someone being given the keys of a castle, but unfortunately not being handled the rule-book, though the rule book already existed. The neutrality rule is presented as being one of the 3 or 4 rules to follow against winds and tides in all wikipedias. So, it has to be protected against all possible vandalism by sysops-knights.

It's just interesting it is implied here that sysops can not be responsible of vandalism.

Also, notice how much this very much general rule is one that can be only modified by english sysops though it is supposed to apply to all of us. Limits of what community is : It is not one huge castle, with several outbuildings, but a set of friendly castles. One has the key of his castle, but not of next door castle. Limits of trust, no ? :-) Thanks Brion for putting international links on protected pages for us.

Anybody to simplify and shorten that neutral point of view page ? Concision would make it easier...

Perhaps we would be better served by implementing something like MeatBall:FileReplacement instead of the sysop-only lockdown. --Brion 10:31 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

Hm. So in effect this automatically creates a type of temp page that can be edited for a time while leaving the active page alone and after a time-out the temp page replaces the active page? If that is the case then I like the idea. This should save giga-quads of hard-drive space since only one version is posted instead of fifty (like in an edit war). But who is credited for the edit after the time-out expires? --mav

As I understood it Mav, after the expiration time, the old (protected) page is automatically "deleted", and the new modified page replace the old one, becomes protected, and a copy is made, which becomes the temp/editable page. Hence, the history of this page is made of the history of the protected page, plus the history of the edits made to the temp page. All edits are appropriately credited. I like that option.

It could be credited to Wikipedia, the collective. It's common practice for newspapers to strip bylines after an article has been edited by many, so too should a wiki do this. Perhaps this would be a good thing in the case of such protected pages as the NPOV, as those are shared community values, not merely one person's. Personally I don't understand the reason why something like this needs so much MeatBall:HardSecurity. Just create the MeatBall:CommunityExpectation that certain pages like this should not be editted without community vetting. At least this is one outsider's opinion, but hopefully a valuable one. -- User:SunirShah

True, but...why would these special pages have a behavior different from the others ? You become aware of how collective an article is when you can "see" how many different authors participated to it. A Wikipedia-authored article leaves you wondering...this is in particular true on meta where so many pages were copied from the main site. Imho, it is especially important that pages such as the NPOV one are seen as resulting from community decision, not only as a couple of people expression. It would be rather unsettling that most pages work with history and a few ones do not. Newcomers, in particular, would doubt the process maybe.

This would not matter much if the discussions resulting in the content of the page were easily accessible. Though this was probably true for first discussions, it is not necessary true anymore since some (most ?) of the discussion is on the mailing list, and not easy to retrieve (to say the least :-))

I don't understand the need for protection either. I can understand it being used to protect pages such as the main one against stupid and degrading vandalism (though I also think there are enough people to clean the damage). Not likely to happen to the NPOV page. I think it wrong that most people (they are only about 40 sysops - what about the others ?) cannot edit pages such as this one, or even the main page, without having to "ask" somebody to do it for them. I think it is a challenge to the "free" notion on a wiki.

MeatBall:CommunityExpectation is a good idea. This is not made obvious enough imho.

Wait-a-minute: This isn't being proposed for all pages is it? I wouldn't support that at all. I would only support this if the function is used for currently protected pages and for pages being fought over in an edit war. It would still be useful for Admins to have the ability to set the time-out period to infinity if that is needed though (or even to keep the current page-protection functionality as an option). But protecting a page or setting the time delay to infinity should be frowned upon and only used in extreme cases. --mav

On second thought, what about standard development temp pages like Cadmium/Temp? Should these be kept informal and ad hoc the way they are or should we combine the above suggested functionality with the /Temp page practice? If we do decide to combine this with the above suggestion then regular logged-in users would need to have the ability to set a long time-out delay and for them to be informed when the time-out is approaching. But then again the /Temp page practice is used so that ugly drafts are not displayed as the main articles and timing-out a /Temp page would replace the article with a possibly ugly and obviously incomplete draft page (see Cadmium/Temp above). This may require logged-in users the ability to set time-out-since-last-edit up to infinity. In other words, if we wanted to use this feature for /Temp pages too, we would still need to have protected pages but the form of protection would be to limit user's ability to set the time-out delay. Admins would be the only people able to set the delay for "protected" pages. We would then have a "Make a draft" link on every page be available to all logged-in users. --mav

I think that mav has a pretty good plan right here. There is one other thing: If we delete pages while retaining their tex (elsewhere) and don't also retain the credit information, then we're violating the GFDL. For temp purposes, we can fix this rather easily; when time runs out on X/Temp (so that X is about to be deleted and X/Temp is about to be renamed X), the earliest old version of X/Temp will be younger than the latest old version of X. So, we simply combine the histories. -- Toby 22:41 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

One thing to note. Fixing vandalism, while exasperating, is one tradition of community building on a wiki. Taking away such common cases as the front page signals that there is a higher power who is entrusted with the wiki's protection while the common man is not, even if that is not really the case (although I think it really does mean that). It's something like a right of passage to protect the wiki. Further, a more massive vandalism requires a larger community effort to come together, which helps build a tradition of MeatBall:BarnRaising. These kinds of rituals are more useful than the effort wasted reverting a page once in a while in my outsider's opinion. It's important to also note that you can always wait out an attacker because the Wikipedia will be around for decades while the attacker will be gone by bedtime. -- User:SunirShah

Protecting a page[edit]

Is there a tag for protecting a single page?

Meaning, a tag to indicate it's protected? Usually there's {{protected}} for that... 68.39.174.238 23:35, 25 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Protected discussion page.[edit]

Under what circumstances would it ever be valid to protect a Discussion page?
173.206.132.10 15:39, 21 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]