Wikipedia:Selective page protection

This is a proposal to improve Wikipedia's defenses against vandalism and abusive sockpuppetry, and to allow edit warring to be controlled more effectively, by modifying the MediaWiki software to permit pages to be protected against editing by specified accounts, IP addresses, and/or IP ranges, while allowing such pages to be edited by other users and/or other IP addresses.

Preventing Vandalism and Abusive Sockpuppetry

The technical means by which vandalism and abusive sockpuppetry can currently be controlled are blunt instruments, which often inflict substantial collateral damage when they are employed. For instance, if a page is being vandalized from a range of dynamic IP addresses, the only remedies currently available are blocking the entire range of IP addresses being used for vandalism, or conventional protection of the page. Even semi-protection prevents many constructive edits by new and unregistered users. Where full protection is needed as a vandalism control measure due to vandals evading semi-protection, the normal editing process is all but stopped. Articles such as Roger Needham are essentially frozen due to long-term full protection -- most of the editors who would improve these articles are not administrators, and are unlikely to request that administrators edit the articles. However, rangeblocking the IP addresses being used to vandalize certain pages prevents many edits by legitimate users who happen to use the same IP range, particularly if the IP range is used by a large internet service provider. With selective page protection, however, pattern vandalism on particular pages could often be prevented with little collateral damage, by protecting the page against editing from the IP range being employed for vandalism. Users not utilizing the offending IP range could continue to edit the protected page, while users who happened to share the IP range employed by the vandal could edit any page except those few pages protected against editing by that specific IP range. For similar reasons, selective page protection might be a valuable means by which to prevent banned users from editing specific pages from particular ranges of IP addresses, while restricting very little legitimate editing of the affected pages, or from the affected IP ranges.

Stopping Edit Wars

The current technical measures used to control edit warring often produce quite undesirable effects. For instance, blocking the users who are edit warring prevents the blocked users from making many edits unrelated to the content dispute, which might be quite beneficial to the project. For this reason, blocking is seen as a particularly unsatisfactory means by which to stop edit wars involving a large number of users who each perform a small number of reversions. Fully protecting the page on which an edit war is occurring, however, prevents all editing of the page, even when such editing is unrelated to the content in dispute. A dispute over a single sentence can quite literally result in an entire article being locked. Selective page protection offers a means to control edit warring that is both effective and precise: a page can be protected against editing by users who are participating in an edit war, while continuing to permit other users to edit the page.