Wikipedia:Experimental vandalism protection

This is a failed proposal.

Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

For the large majority of Wikipedia articles, vandalism is not an unsurmountable problem. However, for those articles which attract the most attention from malicious users, such as George W. Bush, vandalism occurs so frequently that even the dedicated group of editors watching those articles cannot keep up, which reduces the article's usability significantly. Analysis shows that over 90% of recent edits to George W. Bush have been vandalism or reversion of vandalism. Page protection is only a temporary measure against heavy levels of disruption, as one of the core principles of Wikipedia is that (nearly) anyone can edit any article. Here, we propose a system whereby we retain the ability for (nearly) anyone to edit the article while maintaining its usability.

The system is simple. Two copies of the article are maintained. The first is the "original" main article; for example, George W. Bush, hereafter referred to as the main article. The second is kept on a subpage and protected; for lack of a better name, we will use Supervised/George W. Bush, hereafter referred to as the protected article. A boilerplate notice like the following:

This article experiences vandalism frequently, which may impact its usability. A more stable version of this article is kept here. The stable version is updated weekly, so some information may be out of date. For more on this type of article protection, see its description page.

The main article remains freely editable by anyone; vandalism reversion is still greatly encouraged on it. A taskforce of administrators oversee the protected version. It is generated weekly by taking a snapshot of the main article. Then the taskforce removes any simple vandalism and blatant bad-faith POV and updates their version of the article. The protected article's talk page is used for discussions amongst the members of the taskforce and for inquiries from any user.

In addition, the taskforce members should be disinterested parties, and will refrain from making content edits (that is, anything that isn't vandalism reversion) on the main article.

Procedural Prototype

I have completed the example(GWB) of how this article can have an additional locked version as per the Experimental anti-Vandalism idea, Here. George Bush has /VTagged in it because I had to use a different name, but if implemented, that line would not exist, this would replace George Bush. Since it is there, the template has VTagged.

Also, after they edit, they are left in the template page(very similar to parent page, just no tags), so I added a simple "Main Window" link on the top-left of the page.

{{supervisedpage|THE PAGE}} goes on the protected page.

{{pagealsosupervised}} goes on the public page.

The template system stops vandals from removing the tag, which leads to the protected version because George Bush would also be protected, but not the template, which is the article, so it essentually would not really be protected, just the tags.

Be sure to add:

'''[[PAGE NAME|[exit template window]]]'''

...to the top of the template.

For ((pagealsosupervised)) to work, you just need to put the editable template article at "template:article name" and the protected one at "supervised/article name", and the Edit this Page link and the link to the other version will be done for you :).Voice of All^T|@|ESP 07:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The editable version of this article, located here, experiences frequent vandalism, which may impact its usability. This is the protected version of that article, which is manually synchronized by administrators, so information here may be out of date. See: Supervised Articles.

NOTE: This article experiences vandalism frequently, which may impact its usability. A protected version of this article is kept here. The protected version is manually synchronized by administrators, so the information there may be out of date. See: Supervised Articles.

[edit this page]

Semi-protection(Alternative)

We could have multiple layers of semi-protection such as:

Open(no protection)

No Moves
Logged in Only
Logged in with edit count 25+
Logged in with edit count 500+(pretty much like protection, but non-admins can edit)
Protected

Numbers 2-4 are "semiprotection". This would VASTLY cut down on vandalism and would be no where NEAR as restrictive and anti-wiki as page protection.Voice of All^T|@|ESP 19:16, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Procedural Prototype

Semi-protection(Alternative)

See also