The article was protected because of edit warring. You, 209.200.52.180 and various other people . In such a situation administrators do not take sides. Seriously, make all the accusations you like. They don't. They simply protect the page, in whatever state it is in when they get there, as reverting to their preferred version would, of course, be seen as taking sides. Of course, those unfortunate enough not to have their changes in the protected version will immediately start making accusations, usually simply of Protecting the Wrong Version(tm), but sometimes conspiracy theorists such as yourself seem to like to go a bit further. Perhaps you should read this.
It's a bit unfair to say that that is its only purpose. For a start, you omitted its purpose as a convenient tool to separate students who research things properly from those who look at the first thing they find on the Internet. Then there's its use as a way of going to look something up and then wasting several hours reading entirely unrelated articles. Finally despite what you -- and various other people who evidently only look at administrative pages and not the actual articles -- say, there is plenty of stable, useful material there.
Perhaps the problem would go away if people stopped seeing it as one. Isn't it rather like the way people who don't do anything useful end up in management, supervising those who actually get the job done?
I have to take issue with your claim that the majority of changes are vandalism; assuming you are using the same definition of "vandalism" as Wikipedia does -- any intentionally unconstructive revision -- approximately 5% of changes are vandalism.
Chances are one of those 1000 homes did feel the need to contribute; sadly not in a constructive way. Blocking them is better than the alternative, which is letting them continue to screw things up until they get bored and possibly ruin many more pages for many more readers. If there are indeed "more than 1000 homes behind the same firewall", then there's a good chance that they all have the same IP address as far as the outside world is concerned; if this is the case, only one IP address will have been blocked, so it's not really "harsh" blocking of "so many IPs". Finally, such blocks are always temporary and usually limited to anonymous users, and can thus be avoided simply by creating an account (which takes about ten seconds) and leaving it logged in.
A permanent link to a particular revision of every article, that's guaranteed not to change, is available for every revision of every article, view the page you're interested in and click the "Permanent link" link at the bottom of the sidebar. Seems to me that it is quite possible to overcome the "material has changed when verified" problem by simply citing that link instead. That of course doesn't change the fact that no encyclopedia should be cited in serious academic work.
Unless I've missed something, your suggestion would result in hundreds of thousands of blank pages lying around after the community decided it didn't want content but couldn't delete it. How would that help anything?
...anyone who tried to edit a controversial article would be modded -1, Troll, and anyone who vandalized articles by posting tired old memes would be modded +5, Funny?
So you would prefer a system whereby anyone can delete any article, or block any user, and page protection does nothing? "Wiki model" or not, that simply isn't feasible on a project of that size.
And no, the "free" tools don't cut it. As far as I know, the official viewers are for one platform only, and that's Windows. Word for the Mac doesn't count, then?
It allows you to do both those things (create pages, and edit semi-protected pages).
It also allows you to not have an annoying captcha pop up when you try to add an external link, and reduces the chance of your edits being mistaken for vandalism and reverted even though they were perfectly good.
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The article was protected because of edit warring. You, 209.200.52.180 and various other people . In such a situation administrators do not take sides. Seriously, make all the accusations you like. They don't. They simply protect the page, in whatever state it is in when they get there, as reverting to their preferred version would, of course, be seen as taking sides. Of course, those unfortunate enough not to have their changes in the protected version will immediately start making accusations, usually simply of Protecting the Wrong Version(tm), but sometimes conspiracy theorists such as yourself seem to like to go a bit further. Perhaps you should read this.
It's a bit unfair to say that that is its only purpose. For a start, you omitted its purpose as a convenient tool to separate students who research things properly from those who look at the first thing they find on the Internet. Then there's its use as a way of going to look something up and then wasting several hours reading entirely unrelated articles. Finally despite what you -- and various other people who evidently only look at administrative pages and not the actual articles -- say, there is plenty of stable, useful material there.
Perhaps the problem would go away if people stopped seeing it as one. Isn't it rather like the way people who don't do anything useful end up in management, supervising those who actually get the job done?
I have to take issue with your claim that the majority of changes are vandalism; assuming you are using the same definition of "vandalism" as Wikipedia does -- any intentionally unconstructive revision -- approximately 5% of changes are vandalism.
Chances are one of those 1000 homes did feel the need to contribute; sadly not in a constructive way. Blocking them is better than the alternative, which is letting them continue to screw things up until they get bored and possibly ruin many more pages for many more readers. If there are indeed "more than 1000 homes behind the same firewall", then there's a good chance that they all have the same IP address as far as the outside world is concerned; if this is the case, only one IP address will have been blocked, so it's not really "harsh" blocking of "so many IPs". Finally, such blocks are always temporary and usually limited to anonymous users, and can thus be avoided simply by creating an account (which takes about ten seconds) and leaving it logged in.
Any still-living individual, or just one that happens to be in the media at the moment?
A permanent link to a particular revision of every article, that's guaranteed not to change, is available for every revision of every article, view the page you're interested in and click the "Permanent link" link at the bottom of the sidebar. Seems to me that it is quite possible to overcome the "material has changed when verified" problem by simply citing that link instead. That of course doesn't change the fact that no encyclopedia should be cited in serious academic work.
Unless I've missed something, your suggestion would result in hundreds of thousands of blank pages lying around after the community decided it didn't want content but couldn't delete it. How would that help anything?
...anyone who tried to edit a controversial article would be modded -1, Troll, and anyone who vandalized articles by posting tired old memes would be modded +5, Funny?
So you would prefer a system whereby anyone can delete any article, or block any user, and page protection does nothing? "Wiki model" or not, that simply isn't feasible on a project of that size.
This is slashdot. Tildes do not work here.
It allows you to do both those things (create pages, and edit semi-protected pages). It also allows you to not have an annoying captcha pop up when you try to add an external link, and reduces the chance of your edits being mistaken for vandalism and reverted even though they were perfectly good.
Seems like only last week, in fact...
Or possibly just 1000 new servers reporting the wrong time...
You haven't tried Google Sky, then?