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Wikipedia Adopting Semi-Protection of Pages

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the countering-the-angry-jerk-effect dept.

kizzle (the other one) writes "A major policy change on Wikipedia was just passed 103-4-2 along with Jimbo Wales' endorsement to incorporate a process called 'Semi-protection' only on the most frequent targets of vandalism."

5 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. This was probably pretty much necessary by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wikipedia's been under some pretty harsh pressure lately. Orlowski's articles in the Register have been referred to here already; when I replied to Orlowski he responded with an unrelated allegation that Wikipedia had become a haven for pædophiles.

    Quite a lot of people evidently don't like Wikipedia; partly, of course, because its rapid growth is making waves and it promises to grow into an extremely influential (and consequently powerful) source of 'knowledge', but also, I suspect, because 'Jimbo' Wales simply gets up some people's noses.

    --
    I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
  2. Move along ... by arrrrg · · Score: 5, Informative

    While this might be a significant change if you are a frequent Wikipedia editor, it really isn't anything that we on the outside will notice. This is basically a less restricted form of protection that is currently applied to a heavily vandilized pages, where only administrators are allowed to edit. This adds an intermediate status where you don't have to be an administrator, but your account has to be (only) about 4 days old.

  3. This actually helps on some pages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The PHP page over at wikipedia has been attacked by spambots. Basically, what the spambot does is blank the page, and replace the page with links to some web pages the spammer has set up, usually completely unrelated to PHP. The IPs the spammer use constantly change; we think the spammer in question is controlling a number of zombies across the net since the same IP never spams the page more than once.

    When the spammer hits again, this particular for of protection will stop the spammer cold. This does nothing to stop the kind of subtle vandalism where someone falsely states that someone helped assassinate Kennedy, for example. But it does help stem a particular problem some wikipedia pages encounter.

  4. Re:The wiki by Virak · · Score: 5, Informative

    Did you bother to RTFA, or even read the entire summary? This only applies to pages which are frequent targets of vandalism, and only prevents anonymous and very new users from editing them; from the SPP page:

    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.

    While I'm sure there'll be plenty of idiots screaming about how Wikipedia is becoming less 'Free', if anything it's becoming less restricted; up until now, the only possible course of action has been 'full protection', in which case only *admins* can edit the article.

  5. This story is extremely confused by jwales · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is not a major policy change. It is not what is being reported here or elsewhere. It is one of many very minor changes to the software to allow better management of the site by the community. It is my opinion that this particular status is not likely to be used very much at all because the other changes to the software will be more wiki-like and more powerful.

    It is a very unfortunate thing that Wikipedia has gotten so popular that random internal bits of discussion in the community about all kinds of different things are so badly reported as 'news' when they are not. I advise the world to relax a notch or two. :-)

    --Jimbo Wales

    --
    Wikia