User:Dominic/Protected pages considered harmful


 * Scratch page. This will eventually become the new Protected pages considered harmful when I have time to write it. It's in sad shape right now. Dmcdevit·t 09:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Purpose of protection

 * To ensure legal responsibilities are met:
 * Lock-off the copyright license notice for the site (en:Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License)
 * To protect the most frequently accessed entry point, the Main Page, from petty vandalism
 * Lock-off pages about site-wide policy (eg en:Wikipedia:Neutral point of view)
 * To force community editing of other policy/rules pages to be done on talk pages
 * This is more controversial!
 * To enforce cool-down periods in edit wars
 * Somewhat controversial; what do you leave in place? When do you un-protect? What about theoretically already calm third parties who will be turned off by the inability to edit? What if the protecting sysop was involved in the edit war?

Page protection as unwiki
Wikipedia is dependent on its wiki nature for all content and improvement. Being a wiki is crucial to its success and popularity, and its single most important aspect. That means Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, and without unfettered editing, could not have existed and would not survive. The Nupedia experiment is a good example of this principle.
 * Legitimate community policy changes, and even minor spelling corrections and linking, have to be mediated through sysops
 * If there is low sysop interest in some page, requests may not be noticed (sysops as bottleneck)

Does locking a page indicate a lack of trust?
Does locking a page indicate a lack of trust? I know at least in some cases, like the main page of Wikipedia, locking the page makes perfect sense because it is the page most new users see and creating a good impression is a good idea. But how about the typical lock? Surely in most cases there are alternative ways to resolve a problem. As I see it, the philosophy Wikipedia is based on is trust in the public and locking a page indicates a lack of trust.

Besides, if we can show most pages would eventually stabilize into a fairly acceptable version in the long run, this would increase the faith of skeptical or curious people about the Wiki concept.

Suggested improvements

 * Automate the system of temp/draft pages, such that a publically editable copy will take over for the main page after some period of time in the absence of intervention (FileReplacement)
 * Caveat: if a wiki is relatively low activity, vandals could sneak in unnoticed and alter protected pages
 * Caveat: this may be less helpful for edit wars, as it doesn't prevent the parties from butting heads over the draft copy
 * Automatic edit war squashing