User blog comment:H-Man Havoc/Semi-Protected Pages/@comment-743796-20110328144324/@comment-737801-20110328191017

The only reason I think that you think Spart and myself are overworked is because of this one situation. You have to realize that we can’t be on 24/7 and this is more than likely one person, who I dealt with last week who won’t grow up, be mature, and get a life. Generally, it isn’t this bad, and it’s manageable, there are sometimes where there are hours between edits where nothing happens. It’s just this one time and this is the worst I’ve seen it. You can’t plan for the worst situations, but you can plan for the day to day, which is what is happening here. I have several real world examples of this. This is a worst-case scenario where Spart and myself weren’t on, and one person decides that he’s going to the be the weekly immature person and go on a vandalism spree because…well for whatever reason. There are a few things I’d like to say be we do have a language policy. It isn’t an overworked problem, just something that we couldn’t plan for.

However you ignore the fact that admins have to be chosen carefully and we can’t just pick one out and say “congratulations you’re an admin given the ongoing situation”, when they may not be suited to that role. That is something that needs to be considered before making a decision. This is just one person who is completely immature and needs to grow up. There are number of other things I’d like to say, but then we do have a language policy. Admins can’t simply be made because of one situation, a lot of things need to be considered.

As to your cause again to semi-protect pages, I already pointed out several flaws in that. Once an email address for a user is confirmed, then can edit that page, which would require us to up the protection to full, meaning that only Spart, myself, and staff members can edit it. That isn’t an option as sometimes good edits will get ignored as people have to then go to the talk page, post something, then we’d have to take care of it. That would over work me and Spart as we would be the only ones doing that. Making tiny changes that most people would do anyway. The only way to stop vandalism sprees by registered users is to fully protect every single page on the wiki, that isn’t acceptable. Nor it is acceptable to semi-protect pages based on one person who can’t grow up.

There are users here who maintain the wiki, the problem is that only admins can enact bans, and I explained earlier why admins need to be chosen carefully and not because, “oh we have a big vandalism spree and we need someone to stop it so congratulations you’re now an admin.” That can have problems down the road that you may not think of.

The bottom line here from my perspective is that you just want to make things easy by semi-protecting pages for a 24-hour period, which would work, but once the protection goes, it can be vandalized again. Then we have to reprotect the page, and the user, if not caught or comes back with a different name, will go to other articles, or register a user name, and be able to vandalize the article despite the protection. Then we have to up the protection, and eventually we have the entire wiki protected to the level where only Spart and myself can really edit things. That isn’t a solution, that is just needless work and will only put more pressure on Spart and myself to do all the little edits.

I suggest you address Commdor’s points about predicting what pages to protect, mainly us having to be psychic, even if we only protect the “big pages”, they will go to user pages, user talk pages, talk pages, and smaller pages to vandalize, then by your logic, we have to protect those too. Your logic has several flaws in it in the simple fact that eventually the entire wiki would be protected to where user’s can’t even edit anything and only Spart and myself can edit things, I’m pretty sure we’d get into trouble with the staff then.