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Wikipedia Semi-Protection Begins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-than-none dept.

seanvaandering writes "Admins began applying their recently announced 'Wikipedia semi-protection' feature this week. The first articles to be semi-protected were George W. Bush, Hitler, and Jesus Christ, barring the newest 1% of all users and anonymous visitors from modifying the article (apparently Satan didn't make the cut). Does this mark the end of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit?"

4 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Does this mark the end? by Kevin143 · · Score: 5, Informative

    No.

    It marks the end of the free encyclopedia that can be edited by any idiot. Now, it can only be edited by 99% of idiots and most importantly, those specific people that spend the time actually editing the articles.

  2. Re:There's some sort of joke.... by kasperd · · Score: 4, Informative

    And yes, you neeed to track the IP addresses to make sure the same guy doesn't try to read the article five times to approve his own changes.

    But if NAT or a proxy is involved different legitimate users may come from the same IP. And if somebody wants to perform vandalism, it doesn't take much to read the page five times tunneling through five different hosts. I could easilly access the site from 40 different IP adresses from a handfull of different networks. (And that is counting only those to which I have legitimate access).

    --

    Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  3. The problem with rampant reverting by Brushen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi, I'm the writer of the History of Alaska article on Wikipedia, which appeared on Wikipedia's main page on September 27th. Wikipedia's Director of Featured articles, Raul654, who decides what featured articles go on the main page, has a policy of not using protection on featured articles on the main page. I'm not sure about semi-protection, but when History of Alaska was on the main page, it received a lot of vandalism. On one occasion, someone replaced the Prehistory section with obvious vandalism. I think it might have been something like "native americans suk and brains mom's a whore," and rather than reverting to the last version, another Wikipedia user instead removed the comment, and this went unnoticed for several hours! When I awoke that afternoon, I had to readd the entire prehistory section! This made me wonder how much content is lost, temorarily or permanently, for a time through errors when reverting vandalism in a hurry without checking through the edit history. With vandalism not occuring as often, people will have more time to look through the edit history, I would hope.

  4. Re:A better joke by sylvester · · Score: 5, Informative

    uhh...

    http://www.snopes.com/glurge/twoquest.htm

    --
    -Rob Ewaschuk