Wikipedia talk:Main page featured article stability

Good idea[edit]

This seems like a good idea to me - as a regular RC patroller I see a lot of vandalism to the day's featured article. Putting it on the main page acts as a magnet for vandals. Personally I would semi-protect all featured articles (if not all articles), but if that's not an option, then this is a good compromise. Walton ^{Vivat Regina!} 17:49, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wholeheartedly endorse. My (admittedly anecodotal) experience from having articles I helped to FA as TFA is that any improvement is usually marginal (such as minor changes to the opening paragraph) when compared to the number of vandalising edits. This is a pragmatic approach to balancing stability and editability. Oldelpaso 19:39, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just protect it[edit]

Wikipedia vandals have been in the media enough that people will understand why we need to semi-protect high-traffic articles. I've seen the fact that George W. Bush is semi-protected mentioned in several places in the mainstream media, and none of the authors seemed to have a problem with it. I know I don't. This compromise makes things more difficult for casual editors and casual vandals, but doesn't change anything for anyone else. Just protect the damn thing. Then editors who want to contribute can do so and vandals who register accounts to vandalize can get blocked. Recury 20:32, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Why implement a completely new process just for this? What advantage does this have over just semiprotecting the article? Also, the proposal as it stands now would require admin time to inspect the editable version for subtle vandalism and copy it over. If we semi-protect, we could consider using a template to briefly state that the article is semiprotected because it's featured on the Main Page, and link to a longer newbie-friendly explanation of the policy and how to use the talk page to suggest changes, etc. Any established user could implement constructive suggestions. Dave6 ^talk 03:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

While semi-protecting the main page featured article would significantly reduce levels of vandalism, there is substantial opposition to doing this -- see Wikipedia:Main Page featured article protection. This proposal should not be rejected on the grounds that semi-protecting the featured article is adequate, if semi-protection cannot actually be implemented. Additionally, semi-protection cannot prevent all vandalism; there are cases in which main page featured articles have been subjected to repeated vandalism even after semi-protection. A stable version of a featured article, however, would be essentially impossible to vandalize. John254 12:18, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just not seeing any advantages doing it this way as opposed to semi-protecting. Do you think people won't bother to vandalize the editable version of the FA? Recury 16:08, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As the editable version of the featured article would be less visible, it would likely suffer from less vandalism. Generally, the level of vandalism increases in proportion to the visibility of a page, with the main page itself being at the highest risk for vandalism, and requiring continuous full protection to prevent it. Furthermore, even if the editable version of the featured article were vandalized, the impact of the vandalism would be reduced, since fewer readers would see it; most people who wanted to read the article, but not to edit it, would only view the stable version. John254 16:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Instruction creep[edit]

Interesting proposal, except it seems more like instruction creep. Wanna make it simpler? As I write this, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the current TFA, so I can look at its page history and create a link to the last version before it appeared on the main page. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 11:40, 10 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, the things you can do after you study Help:Page history... Zzyzx11 (Talk) 11:52, 10 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

...especially the "(cur)" links... Zzyzx11 (Talk) 12:03, 10 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If we link to a prior version of the featured article, many users who edit the article will revert all edits that occurred since that version. John254 14:51, 10 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unnecessary[edit]

This isn't necessary, especially not since the introduction of the cascading protection for the templates. Often enough, the main page FA gets improved by being there, and any sort of "stability" will decrease the ability of that happening. I'm firmly opposed to this. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it gets improved. But what about the many articles that don't get improved, because their editors are too busy reverting vandalism to the featured article? -Amarkov moo! 19:26, 12 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

So they don't get improved. I'd rather the positive maybe. --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:36, 12 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What? It is certain that editors must spend their time reverting FA vandalism. This must, by its nature, take up time that they could use for other things. They might not have spent that time improving articles, but maybe they would have. And I highly doubt that a good, experienced, editor can not do in an hour all the improvement that the FA will get in a day. -Amarkov moo! 04:47, 15 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Users spend a lot of time reverting on the FA? Ehhh.... that's really stretching the truth there. The number of times I've seen vandalism last 20 to 30 minutes on the TFA is enough to show that there is not a whole lot of time wasted on watching the TFA. Yeah, there are lots of reverts. But most of them are quick and hardly anybody is using time to clean up some of the more clever vandalism that is done. If there is an editor heavily watching the TFA for more than a few minutes per day, I'd be shocked. --- RockMFR 18:13, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why all the moving around?[edit]

Moving the live page to "Wikipedia:MPFA/(page name)", copying the article back to its original title and protecting that, then after it's no longer featured moving it back from the subpage to its original title seems a bit complicated and pointless. Why not just have the main page link to the protected subpage and leave the editable version alone? Seems to me that any vandals who would be deterred by the proposal would be by this also, since it involves the same amount of clicks for the vandal. -- BlastOButter42 ^See Hear _Speak 08:48, 18 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is a great idea[edit]

Having a featured article which large numbers of readers will naturally turn to as their first edit, and which is editable, has always been a problem. The worst part about it is that it makes Recent changes patrol much, much too easy, causing the RC patrollers to just sit around on their asses waiting for the one article they KNOW will be vandalized to be vandalized.

Why not give them a challenge?

When prospective vandals can't mess with the featured article, they will click around on various links at random, or use the search feature, and end up vandalizing large numbers of unexpected articles which the RC patrollers will have to work at to spot. The RCP folks have had things far too easy for far too long, now they need to earn their salary (or whatever it is they receive for their efforts here). Spread out the vandalism over as wide an area as possible, I say! --Xyzzyplugh 20:54, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. One, RC patrol is no easier if only one article is vandalized, because everything goes on recent changes. And second, even if it is slightly more taxing for RC patrollers, surely it's better to have vandalism spread out on random articles than to have it concentrated on the most visible article on Wikipedia. -Amarkov moo! 20:57, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution[edit]

At its core it's a nice idea, but I'm afraid occassionally copy-pasting material to the stable version will lead to people forgetting about attributing the changes to the people who made them (as required by the GFDL). It could be redirected afterwards, but that would leave messy duplicates and history merges will probably make diff watching in the period it was on the main page completely useless from the mix of edits to the two pages. - Mgm|^(talk) 11:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Can't improve the high-vis version[edit]

It's a good idea in principle, but locking the high visibility version of the page altogether would prevent improvements to the article. Consider this scenario: an article gets featured status, is edited shortly becoming the featured article of the day, and that edit includes some bad spelling or grammatical (or, worse, factual) errors. This is the version that gets linked to from the main page, and subsequent edits to correct the mistakes can only be made to the moved "live" article, not to the version that visitors to the main page will see. For that reason, I think semiprotection is a much better option. Waggers 09:46, 28 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it is. Was anyone actually suggesting full protection? -Amarkov moo! 14:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the proposal does suggest full protection. I too think Waggers makes a good point, and it's a lot easier to whack a few sleeper accounts every day than constantly fight the IP vandalism. It would be necessary to ensure that the good edits to the semi-protected copy are mirrored to the unprotected one, though, or they will be lost at the end of the day. Also, for this to not be discouraging to new good faith editors, the good changes to the unprotected copy should be moved to the semi'd version quite often, like hourly if possible. (A pain, but still less work than IP fighting.) — coel acan — 18:09, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bad Idea[edit]

The whole idea of Wikipedia is that it can be edited by anyone. Requiring someone who may be new to Wikipedia to jump through hoops to edit the featured article is a bad idea and I would be shocked if this became some sort of policy. — The Storm Surfer 07:09, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is a wiki[edit]

The featured article is probably what many newcomers read if they come in through the main page (rather than through Google). We should not be promoting the idea that the English Wikipedia has stable versions. If there is vandalism, newcomers should see it. Why are we trying to hide it? --- RockMFR 18:10, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]