Wikipedia:Protecting BLP articles feeler survey

The survey is now closed. See new discussions on flagged revisions and BLPs on the relevant pages.

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This page began with the intention of being a 'simple survey' discussing the issues facing Wikipedia in the area of 'Biographies of living people'. Participation was high, and the page grew fairly rapidly into a very large collection of polls, comments, thoughts, and discussions - all of which are linked to below for you to browse, or contribute to. The original introduction to the page follows;

This page is a simple survey to see if there is any support for, and what people think of, the ideas of enhancing the protection of Biographies of living persons (BLP) articles on Wikipedia, the articles about living people. THIS IS NOT A POLL TO CHANGE ANYTHING TODAY. Rather, it is just a survey to get a general idea of what people think, and feel, of the ideas to address the outstanding problems with biographical information on living people. The two ideas that are floated most often are to use one of the following by default on all biographies:

• Semi-protection: locking articles so that only those with accounts more than a few days old can edit them, or
• Wikipedia:Flagged revisions: periodic tagging of the most recent good version, which is then the version visible to the public.

This spawned from this conversation on User:Jimbo Wales's talk page.

Two example studies that were compiled of vandalism in general, and vandalism to high profile BLPs, are:

• General study of anon vandalism to WP articles (Link to entire study: [1])
• Study of vandalism to articles about United States Senators

It may be worth reading some user essays on the subject: Category:User essays on BLP

Again: This survey is not to change anything today but to just see what if any options are popular, and to see if there is support to later work further on one, the other, both, or none.