Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy: Wikipedia has again modified its policy and is slowly starting to lock down even tighter.
The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had “protected” from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were “semi-protected,” open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days.
While these measures may appear to undermine the site’s democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site.
Read the talk page for Christina Aguilera — it’s an absolute gas.
As the NY Times article points out (way down the page), protection and semi-protection are not new to Wikipedia, and in most cases they are temporary. Semi-protection still allows anyone to edit an article, if they are not already a registered user they simply have to wait four days.
