This userspace essay is an unfinished draft, and is not yet ready for use. Please do not attribute material from this essay to me ( Syrenka V) until I remove this notice; it cannot be assumed to represent my considered opinion.

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This page in a nutshell: This userspace essay advocates more aggressive page protection policies on Wikipedia, as an alternative to aggressive deletion, in order to address spam, paid editing, and conflicts of interest. — Syrenka V

To a large extent, deletionism appears to be motivated by a desire to counteract spam, undisclosed paid editing, and conflicts of interest. ^[1] While I agree that these are very serious problems, deletionism is a dysfunctional response to them. More aggressive page protection policies would be a more effective response. Page protection is currently applied too cautiously, and primarily against vandalism, rather than spam. This needs to change.

History and background

I did not originate the idea of protection as a remedy for spam. I first learned of the idea while participating in the third deletion discussion for mySupermarket, which was closed as Keep, an outcome that I had advocated strongly. Just before the close, user Deb wrote:

• Protect. I would not argue that this topic is not notable. However, I think there is a serious need for protection of articles which have a history like this one, and perhaps a general investigation into paid editing (unless there is one already going on that I don't know about). I see the amount of spam increasing daily, and I see firms openly advertising for people to write their wikipedia articles.

I responded:

• I endorse protection of the page after rewrite. My arguments in favor of keeping the page (after rewrite— Unscintillating's or my own), on the basis of notability of the topic, should not be read as sympathy for allowing further contributions by the undisclosed paid editors who created the problematic versions.

I fully expected indefinite protection (of some kind) to be imposed on mySupermarket after the end of the deletion discussion. To the best of my knowledge as of 20 November 2017 ^[update], protection was never applied, even temporarily. At the time, I knew little about page protection, and I went to WP:Protection policy ( WP:PP) to find out more—and to WP:Requests for page protection ( WP:RPP) to see how protection was being used in practice. To my surprise, I found that although indefinite semi-protection ( WP:SEMI, WP:SILVERLOCK) was potentially available under WP:PP for "pages that are subject to heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy (such as biographies of living persons, neutral point of view)", in practice semi-protection seemed to be used almost exclusively for vandalism, and mostly in very short-term fashion. The information page Rough guide to semi-protection ( WP:ROUGH) reinforced this impression.

Extended confirmed protection ( WP:ECP, WP:BLUELOCK, 30/500 protection) was used even more cautiously and sparingly. WP:PP reserved extended confirmed protection for cases where semi-protection had already been tried and found to be ineffective, and gave the number of articles to which it was currently applied—as of 20 November 2017 ^[update], only 1045 articles out of the 5,514,987 in existence on Wikipedia, which works out to less than 0.0019% of the total. The reasons for such extreme caution appeared to be related to a wish to avoid biting the newcomers—to avoid offending outsiders with little or no history of registered editing, in the hope that they would eventually become regulars. Again, the information page Rough guide to extended confirmed protection ( WP:ECPGUIDE) reinforced the impression left by WP:BLUELOCK.

To me—at that time still a relative outsider—this extreme caution in the use of protection appeared to be a serious misjudgment of the psychology of outsiders. And it made a stark contrast with what I saw, from my inclusionist point of view, as the abattoir of articles at AfD (and its proposed deletion annex). Wikipedia's insiders appeared to be anything but cautious in the use of article deletion, a procedure far more extreme than even full protection ( WP:FULL, WP:GOLDLOCK). Non-administrators might not be able to fully protected pages, but we could at least read them, and examine their history—and, generally speaking, we could expect to be able to continue to do those things indefinitely. By contrast, to a non-administrator, a deleted page might as well not exist. According to section WP:PERMADEL within WP:Deletion policy, even the possibility of eventual undeletion could not be relied on:

Deletion should not be used for archiving a page. The developers have indicated that the deleted pages can be cleared or removed from the database at any time.

The actual words of the developer in question (from the link in WP:PERMADEL above) are even more blunt (emphasis in the original):

Deletion means deletion. The deleted page archives ARE TEMPORARY TO FACILITATE UNDELETION OF PAGES WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DELETED and are subject to being cleared or removed AT ANY TIME WITHOUT WARNING. -- brion 00:50, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can recall, I have never been offended by seeing a protection-lock symbol on a page. By contrast, I have more than once felt outrage at the deletion, or attempted deletion, or even {{ notability}}-tagging of material I had relied on purely as a reader (and had not personally created) and wanted to be able to refer back to. I was deterred for years from participating actively as a Wikipedia editor because of concerns about possible wasted work from deletion. I'm hardly alone among outsiders in this kind—and, in some cases, degree—of concern. Nor is it shared only by outsiders. ^{[2] [3] [4] [5]}

Notes and references