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To the Wikimedia Foundation
[A] The usual arguments that IP editors create more good content than they destroy, have so far failed to take into account the specially high damage that vandalism brings to BLPs.
[B] Most of the evidence that IP-editing is overall-beneficial to WP comes from non-English wikis, where IP-editor behavior is quite different. Such evidence is also epidemiological, and does not address the question of what would happen prospectively, if IP editors were forced to register as name-users, or not edit at all.
[C] Even if being forced to register deters some IP editors from editing WP at all, protection of an additional 13% of en.wiki (the BLP part) would still presumably NOT influence the beginning editor who wishes not to register, since such editors may still edit the rest of Wikipedia (including biographies of deceased persons, if biography interests them).
[Edit by petition proposer: In answer to questions on the talk page, I had envisioned a Mediawiki software patch where an article is immediately sprotected as soon as the category:Living people goes on it, and this also applies to all the articles that have this tag already. To prevent "unlocking" the article by removal of the cat-living-people tag, this patch would have to work as a one-way latch, so that once an article is sprotected in this way, only a sysop could unprotect it, as is normal with sprotection now (only the mechanism would change, since again, we need this to be automatic). This does a needed job which otherwise would be manual for 300,000 BLPs, most of which are probably not sprotected now. So much for dealing with backlogs. See other comments on the talk page. I feel it's appropriate to add this part below the above signatures, since they were placed before it was made clear how this might work. However, I'm by no means married to this particular mechanism, so long as it's reasonably automatic (avoiding hand sprotection of this huge bunch of BLPs is the entire point). S B H arris 17:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
Please help publicise this petition.
This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
To the Wikimedia Foundation
[A] The usual arguments that IP editors create more good content than they destroy, have so far failed to take into account the specially high damage that vandalism brings to BLPs.
[B] Most of the evidence that IP-editing is overall-beneficial to WP comes from non-English wikis, where IP-editor behavior is quite different. Such evidence is also epidemiological, and does not address the question of what would happen prospectively, if IP editors were forced to register as name-users, or not edit at all.
[C] Even if being forced to register deters some IP editors from editing WP at all, protection of an additional 13% of en.wiki (the BLP part) would still presumably NOT influence the beginning editor who wishes not to register, since such editors may still edit the rest of Wikipedia (including biographies of deceased persons, if biography interests them).
[Edit by petition proposer: In answer to questions on the talk page, I had envisioned a Mediawiki software patch where an article is immediately sprotected as soon as the category:Living people goes on it, and this also applies to all the articles that have this tag already. To prevent "unlocking" the article by removal of the cat-living-people tag, this patch would have to work as a one-way latch, so that once an article is sprotected in this way, only a sysop could unprotect it, as is normal with sprotection now (only the mechanism would change, since again, we need this to be automatic). This does a needed job which otherwise would be manual for 300,000 BLPs, most of which are probably not sprotected now. So much for dealing with backlogs. See other comments on the talk page. I feel it's appropriate to add this part below the above signatures, since they were placed before it was made clear how this might work. However, I'm by no means married to this particular mechanism, so long as it's reasonably automatic (avoiding hand sprotection of this huge bunch of BLPs is the entire point). S B H arris 17:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
Please help publicise this petition.