Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Extended confirmed protection policy

This was a lengthy RfC and took quite some reading. Thank you for your patience in awaiting a close. First of all, thanks are due to the initiators for getting the discussion underway; it was a discussion that needed to be had at some point and starting with a properly structured RfC gives us the best chance of establishing a consensus and making the best use of the time that the hundreds of participants have invested. I should also thank all the participants, especially those who provide insightful rationales and those who do not yet meet the criteria for 'extend confirmed', who brought a different perspective that would otherwise have been easy to overlook.

To business. Let me fist state the obvious. Of the three options presented here, option C is by far and away the most popular. While closing discussions is not merely a matter of counting heads, administrators are not entitled to a supervote and cannot ignore such a large groundswell of opinion. Therefore, I find that there is a consensus for option C:

Option C: Allow use to combat any form of disruption (such as vandalism, edit wars, etc.) on any topic, given that semi-protection has proven to be ineffective. Notification is to be posted in a subsection of AN for review, unless the topic is already authorized for 30/500 protection by the Arbitration Committee.

This is borne out not just by the number of participants supporting option C (though it is worth noting that almost twice as many people supported option C as supported option A and B combined), but by the detailed rationales that many of the participants left, and it was these—rather than drive-by or "pile-on" votes—to which I paid particular attention.

The obvious aside, the job of a discussion closer is to sum up the discussion, to pick out common themes, and to help provide recommendations based on those for further refinement or to bring the issue to a final conclusion. So, first, there was a common feeling—or perhaps more an acknowledgement in some cases—among most participants that there are certain situations in which semi-protection is simply inadequate to protect the encyclopaedia from harm from anybody sufficiently determined, and that full protection is too blunt an instrument, and therefore we (the community, through our elected administrators) need to be able to use the new "extended confirmed protection" in at least some circumstances. I acknowledge that there is a principled minority who would rather this new level of protection did not exist or was not used at all; they have conducted themselves honourably, but as I understand it such discussion is outwith the scope of this RfC: the deed is done and we are here to decide under what circumstances admins should be using the new protection level. Despite the overwhelming support for option C, many editors expressed reservations about it being used flippantly and tempered their comments with caveats like "extremely rare", "sparingly", "truly necessary", "clear-cut criteria", and "only when all lesser options have been exhausted" (to pick out a few); clearly many feel that the mandatory notification to the administrators' noticeboard (for protections not related to arbitration enforcement) will serve an important purpose in allowing the community to monitor and review its use, and expect that these protections will be rare (possibly excepting an initial wave as admins make use of an option that was not available before). Therefore I believe it is reasonable to say that there is a consensus that extended-confirmed protection should not be used as a first resort, and possibly only where full protection would be necessary were it not for the new protection level. Other recurring themes worth picking out include:

• There is little appetite to see extended confirmed protection become commonplace, and certainly not anything like as commonplace as semi-protection.
• Concerns that reckless or naive admins will over-use the new protection level and use it in cases where it is not appropriate (which is a possibility with ~1200 admins, but I hope one that can be addressed through the reviews at AN).
  • Further to this, BethNaught's suggestion on the talk page to send a mass message to all admins informing them of the policy for use of extended confirmed protection is one I endorse, and MusikAnimal is to be commended for volunteering his bot to assist with tracking new uses of the protection level.
• Similarly, that those of us who are long past the threshold for 'extended confirmation' will simply forget that the vast majority of people cannot edit articles under extended confirmed protection. I recommend (though this is a personal recommendation, not one based on the discussion) that we consider putting a red background in the edit window as we do for admins editing fully protected pages and template editors editing protected templates, or some similar visual reminder.
• At least one editor cautioned against over-using the new protection level and starting an "arms race" with disruptive editors.
• As with any other protection, extended confirmed protection should be set for the shortest practicable duration (the initiators apparently believed this to be a given—as did I initially—but there was some confusion over it so it bears repeating in the closing remarks).

I recommend that the Protection Policy be updated with the wording from option C, with guidance related to over- or mis-use, but that this not come fully into force until the mass message to administrators has been sent out. I further recommend that a review of extended-confirmed protection (excluding arbitration enforcement) be done in three months' time to establish whether its use is living up to expectations.

—HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:46, 12 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]