User:Viennese Waltz/Semiprotection

You're seeing this because you may have suggested that we should protect the main page featured articles. This has been repeatedly suggested in the past, but it has never been seriously considered because it is a very bad idea. Why? For several reasons:


 * Almost without exception, featured articles are improved by their time on the main page (some of them greatly improved). Check out these before-and-after diffs from September, 2005: [1][2][3]. Protecting the featured articles means that these pages may not be improved.
 * A featured article is supposed to "exemplify our very best work, representing Wikipedia's unique qualities on the Internet". This includes being editable by anyone. Visitors often tend to look at our most visible articles, and having those articles editable helps attract new users to the project.
 * Vandalism (especially to highly visible articles like the main page featured article) is cleaned up very quickly, often in only a matter of seconds, helped by automated bots such as Tawkerbot2.
 * This is also codified in the page protection policy: When a page is particularly high profile, either because it is linked off the main page, or because it has recently received a prominent link from offsite, it will often become a target for vandalism. It is best not to protect pages in this case. Instead, consider adding them to your watchlist, and reverting vandalism yourself. - Wikipedia:Protection policy
 * For the same reasons, featured articles should not be semi-protected either. "Semi-protection is only to be applied as a response to serious vandalism and not as a pre-emptive measure against the threat or probability of vandalism, such as when certain pages suddenly become high profile due to current events or being linked from a high-traffic website... Do not semi-protect the Featured Article, in the same way the Feature Article was (generally) not fully protected before the advent of Semi[protection]" - Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy