Peer Governance - Semi-protection
The Semi-protection Clause = restrictions in openness in peer production projects
The Semi-protection clause in Wikipedia - Discussion
The Critique of Nicholas Carr
Wikipedia recently tightened the restrictions on editing. In addition to banning some contributors from the site, the administrators adopted an "official policy" of what they called, in good Orwellian fashion, "semi-protection" to prevent "vandals" (also known as people) from messing with their open encyclopedia. Here's how they explained the policy: Semi-protection of a page prevents unregistered editors and editors with very new accounts from editing that page. "Very new" is currently defined as four days. A page can be temporarily semi-protected by an administrator in response to vandalism, or to stop banned users with dynamic IPs from editing pages.
Semi-protection should normally not be used as a purely pre-emptive measure against the threat or probability of vandalism before any such vandalism occurs, such as when certain pages suddenly become high profile due to current events or being linked from a high-traffic website. In the case of one or two static IP vandals hitting a page, blocking the vandals may be a better option than semi-protection. It is also not an appropriate solution to regular content disputes since it may restrict some editors and not others. However, certain pages with a history of vandalism and other problems may be semi-protected on a pre-emptive, continuous basis. Jimmy Wales, proposed "that we eliminate the requirement that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the general public." (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php )
The Defense by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales: Semi-protection seems to be a great success in many cases. I think that it should be extended, but carefully, in a couple of key ways.
1. It seems that some very high profile articles like George W. Bush are destined to be semi-protected all the time or nearly all the time. I support continued occassional experimention by anyone who wants to take the responsibility of guarding it, but it seems likely to me that we will keep such articles semi-protected almost continuously. If that is true, then the template at the time is misleading and scary and distracting to readers. I propose that we eliminate the requirement that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the general public. They can be categorized as necessary, of course, so that editors who take an interest in making sure things are not excessively semi-protected can do so, but there seems to me to be little benefit in announcing it to the entire world in such a confusing fashion.
2. A great many minor bios of slightly well known but controversial individuals are subject to POV [point-of-view] pushing trolling, including vandalism, and it seems likely that in such cases, not enough people have these on their personal watchlists to police them as well as we would like. Semi-protection would at least eliminate the drive-by nonsense that we see so often. The basic concept here is that semi-protection has proven to be a valuable tool, with very broad community support, which gives good editors more time to deal with serious issues because there is less random vandalism. Because the threshold to editing is still quite low for anyone who seriously wants to join the dialogue in an adult, NPOV [neutral point of view], responsible manner, I do not find any reason to hold back on some extended use of it. (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php )
The Explanation by Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky on why it is necessary
URL = http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/05/25/news_of_wikipedias_death_greatly_exaggerated.php
““The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity." (N. Carr) Carr was right earlier, and he is wrong now. Carr would like Wikipedia to have committed itself to openess at all costs, so that changes in the model are failure conditions. That isn’t the case however; Wikipedia is committed to effectiveness, and one of the things it has found to be effective is openess, but where openess fails to provide the necessary defenses on it’s own, they’ll make changes to remain effective. The changes in Wikipedia do not represent the death of Wikipedia but adaptation, and more importantly, adaptation in exactly the direction Carr suggests will work. We’ve said it here before: Openness allows for innovation. Innovation creates value. Value creates incentive. If that were all there was, it would be a virtuous circle, because the incentive would be to create more value. But incentive is value-neutral, so it also creates distortions — free riders, attempts to protect value by stifling competition, and so on. And distortions threaten openess. As a result, successful open systems create the very conditions that require a threaten openess. Systems that handle this pressure effectively continue (Slashdot comments.) Systems that can’t or don’t find ways to balance openess and closedness — to become semi-protected — fail (Usenet.) “ Shirky concludes: “At the extremes, co-creation, openess, and scale are incompatible. Wikipedia’s principle advantage over other methods of putting together a body of knowledge is openess, and from the outside, it looks like Wikipedia’s guiding principle is “Be as open as you can be; close down only where there is evidence that openess causes more harm than good; when this happens, reduce openess in the smallest increment possible, and see if that fixes the problem."
People who build or manage large-scale social software form the experimental wing of political philosophy — in the same way that the US Constitution is harder to change than local parking regulations, Wikipedia is moving towards a system where evidence of abuse generates anti-bodies, and those anti-bodies vary in form and rigidity depending on the nature and site of the threat. By responding to the threats caused by its growth, Wikipedia is moving the hierachy +community."