UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard/Archives/Protecting Archives

This recent spam edit reminded me of a thought I had a while back. Can we semi-protect the archives? There is no reason anons should edit these pages and they are frequent targets for spam bots for some reason. This would be a good way to stop spam or nonsense edits to archives. It would also stop some confused editors from adding questions to archives (A somewhat frequent event) saving us the trouble of moving them to the proper talk page. --AKB   18:54, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

: I suggested that here (okay, I was suggesting full protection, but the basic arguments still apply). Semi-protection might be a better idea and I'm certainly in favour of it. rpeh  19:00, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

::Having reviewed the arguments provided by the admins that responded to the topic that Rpeh linked I'll add this as well. By Semi-Protecting archives we allow for those instances of a topic that needs to be readdressed, and we also will stop the vandalism to those pages which means that it does fall under our Protection Policy. I also wish to say that since nearly every edit to an archive is wrong, since generally speaking only maintenance editing is allowed for archive pages there is no reason not to semi-protect archives. Anons and new users are less likely to know how to perform maintenance than Auto-confirmed users. Though it does create more work for the Admins it shouldn't be too much that they would be overwhelmed. --AKB   19:24, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

::: That old discussion is hilarious due to the laziness on display. I have been thinking about the Archives for the longest time, as it makes no sense that we allow users to edit them freely then revert all edits anyway. Of course, it will take a long time protecting the existing archives, but it will be worth it. Just say the word. --Krusty 19:41, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

:::: I know what you mean... I don't think you're going to want to do the existing ones by hand though: assuming every page that transcludes the   template is an archive, there are about 700 of them. It would be easier to ask Daveh to give bots the   right and do the first lot like that. rpeh  19:51, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

:::::Well, if they all use the Template, why not add in to the template? Does that work? You could then add another optional parameter for when you want to skip the section. --  20:03, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

::::::There's no way of saying "protect every page that uses this one". You can do it the other way around - "protect every page that this one uses", but I don't believe there's any alternative to protecting each page. rpeh  20:38, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

 If we are going to do this, which it looks like we are going to, we should have the bots do all the heavy lifting and just protect any new ones manually. Seems like the best solution. --AKB   21:06, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

: I'll ask Daveh to make the necessary change. rpeh  22:03, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

:: Just as a reminder to myself more than anything, once this is done we should change the message here to check for the word "archive" in the title and display a different message directing people to the current talk page. rpeh  18:17, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

  Okay, RoBoT is currently going through the list of pages to protect them and add the   template. I spotted a few pages that weren't using the   template and did those manually, but there may be others out there. I've changed the protection message to include a link to the current talk page - test it by logging out and trying to edit this, for instance. I've added an extra line to the protection policy to cover our latest addition - tweak it if you like. Otherwise, I think we're done. rpeh  08:12, 25 April 2011 (UTC)