Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 24.255.122.105 (talk) at 19:40, 17 December 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Misplaced Pages:Semi-protection policy . Jump to: navigation, search This page has been temporarily protected from editing to deal with vandalism. Please discuss changes on the talk page or request unprotection. Shortcut: WP:SPP WP:SEMI

Important Note from Jimbo to news media: I see that some news media have picked this story up as if it is important. Please please please don't do that. This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a 'validated' state (better name should be determined) and so on. Treating this as a major policy change is therefore a huge huge error being made by people who have no understanding of how Misplaced Pages works.--Jimbo Wales 16:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

This page is an official policy on Misplaced Pages. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to edit the page as needed, but please make sure that changes you make to this policy reflect consensus before you make them. Note: This policy is now official but it has yet to be implemented, so it is too soon to request that pages be semi-protected.

Semi-protection of a page prevents the newest X% of registered users and all unregistered users from editing that page. Semi-protection is only applied if the page in question is facing a serious vandalism problem. It is not an appropriate solution to editorial disputes of any kind since it may restrict some editors and not others. Administrators apply semi-protection in the same manner as current full protection against vandalism is applied — either on their own initiative or following an alert on an article's talk page, requests for page protection, the administrator's noticeboard or some other relevant page. 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. Only when there is evidence of a serious problem of vandalism should semi-protection be applied.

To request that semi-protection of an article be lifted, a simple note on the article's talk page or the noticeboard should be sufficient, but the page protection request page can be used if necessary. Any administrator can lift a semi-protection.

Articles that are semi-protected are indicated with

Editing of this article by new or unregistered users is currently disabled. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. If you cannot edit this article and you wish to make a change, you can submit an edit request, discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

and listed at WP:PP in the same way as protections are at present.

Semi-protection:

   * Is not intended to prohibit anonymous editing.
   * Is not intended for pre-emptive protection of articles that might get vandalized.

Template added to semi-protected pages:

This page is temporarily protected from being edited by unregistered users and users with very new accounts in order to deal with vandalism. Please discuss changes on the talk page or request unprotection.

Rationale

Many users have noticed and complained about the level of vandalism in high-profile articles, such as George W. Bush. Instead of the text and images one would expect from a reputable encyclopedia, the reader discovers vulgarities and either incorrect or deliberately distasteful writing. Vandalized versions are displayed for several hours a day to readers and editors alike. Many edits to these high-profile articles are reversions of vandalism. In the worst case articles receive few good edits; instead, they have turned into battlegrounds in which virtually every edit is either one by a vandal or one reverting vandalism. So much time is wasted that nothing substantive can be done to improve the material or quality of information in these articles. This situation tarnishes the reputation of Misplaced Pages and hampers the efforts of reputable editors to improve article content quality.

The idea behind semi-protection is very simple. It works like regular protection does now, except non-admins may edit a page, provided their account is not amongst the very newest, much like with moving a page. There is one additional level of protection proposed:

   0. Open
   1. Moves Prohibited
   2. Editable only by registered users not in the newest X% of accounts
   3. Full protection (Editable only by administrators)

The barrier should be low enough that editors who wish to contribute constructively need only wait a short time (on en.wikipedia, the newest 1% of accounts last about 4 days) to be fully active.

   * Discussion at the talk page.
   * There has been a straw poll which received about a 96% support ratio out of a total of 110 Wikipedians. See here for details.
   * Jimbo has also expressed his support.