Topic on Template talk:Main page

Protection level of MediaWiki main page

30
MZMcBride (talkcontribs)

Hi. I'm going to try downgrading the protection level of the main page (MediaWiki). It's been set to [edit=sysop:move=sysop] [cascading] since January 2007. This sucks for a few reasons:

  • it's anti-wiki;
  • cascading protection gets in the way of updating sub-templates; and
  • it's still sufficiently difficult to obtain autoconfirmed and figure out how to edit that the software restrictions arguably add little actual protection.

So we're gonna try it out for a bit and see what happens. If there's a lot of vandalism, we can always re-protect or investigate other options like FlaggedRevs.

Qgil-WMF (talkcontribs)
Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

+1 as well. I had already proposed something similar in Thread:Project:Current issues/Replace full protection with FlaggedRevs, but it seems the lack of FlaggedRevs in the Main and Project namespaces prevent a more permissive approach. Is there a reason for that configuration?

In any case, since the main page is semi-protected and could potentially be vandalized, I don't see a reason for Template:Main page not to be as well. Ideally, FlaggedRevs could allow an extra level of scrutiny, not so much with vandalism prevention in mind, but to provide a system for changes in the landing page not to go public without peer review.

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

Unfortunately, we've been getting more test/spam edits to it recently, and I'm considering reinstating the full protection.

HappyDog (talkcontribs)

That's kind of why we protected it in the first place.

MZMcBride (talkcontribs)
Ypnypn (talkcontribs)

But if the main page is semiprotected, why is template:Main page (i.e. the actual content of the main page) fully-protected?

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Exactly. This seems a bit of a dichotomy, especially since (afaik) FlaggedRevs can be applied to the template namespace.

MZMcBride (talkcontribs)

Hi. I've made you both local administrators here so that you can take a look at the protection and FlaggedRevs settings and make this better, as necessary and appropriate. :-)

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Woah, thanks! But visiting gives me the following error:

The page "Template:Main page" cannot be reviewed. No configuration is possible.

I guess this message should be more informative, because I can't figure out whether this is because I lack the proper rights, or because the template namespace is not set up to use flagged revisions, or some other reason...

MZMcBride (talkcontribs)

I'm not sure how you got there. I get the same error, so I doubt it's permissions-related.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

I pieced the link together from a page that already had FlaggedRevs configured, and the documentation at Help:Extension:FlaggedRevs.

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

This wiki isn't setup to use flaggedrevs in that fashion, unlike enwiki.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Are these configuration settings visible somewhere?

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

This or a related file.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Thanks for the pointer. According to that, it seems this is the relevant file. I'll take a look at it later.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Update: Indeed, it seems only the Help, Manual and Extension namespaces are set up to use FlaggedRevs in mw.org:

elseif ( $wgDBname == 'mediawikiwiki' ) {
	// Set up 2009-08-07 BV w/ config rec from ^demon
	$wgFlaggedRevsNamespaces = array(
		NS_HELP,
		100 /* NS_MANUAL */,
		102 /* Extension */,
	);
        ...
}

Does anyone know why other namespaces aren't included?

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

Furthermore, to apply different levels of FlaggedRevs as a different protection level, sysops would need the stablesettings right.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)
Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

Waldir, haven't we discussed this already? :p FlaggedRevs is not applied to main namespace pages because the main namespace is not usually content which requires to be verified on this wiki; it's mostly discussions, reports, ideas etc. but not docs. If we really need it, the easiest would be adding the Project: namespace to FR and moving the main page to that ns.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

If you mean here, you did indeed say "there's no FlaggedRevs in main and Project namespace, so not much" (not sure what the "not so much" part meant, btw), so first, I assumed the namespaces you didn't mention did have FlaggedRevs, which is not the case (I don't know why you excluded templates from the survey of fully protected pages you presented there; after all, I didn't mention any particular namespaces in the original message of that thread), and second, that didn't explain why FlaggedRevs wasn't set for those namespaces. Thanks for clarifying that now.

I don't think it's a matter of "really needing" something; I presented my rationale for using FlaggedDevs instead of full protection in that thread, in a generic way: so the wiki would be more open to improvements by common editors, while still making sure that no actual damage is publicly visible in case there's vandalism. I still think that's a worthy goal, so my question is: is there any reason to not setup FR so it can be applied to pages in any namespace and then change all currently fully protected pages (except perhaps in the User namespace) to semi-protected? What disadvantages could that bring?

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

"So not much" meant that there wasn't much to do; sorry for not being clear. Yes, FlaggedRevs would be IMHO a very bad idea for main namespace and shouldn't be extended just for the sake of one page; it would require wider discussion and consideration of what FlaggedRevs is for on this wiki (Special:ValidationStatistics and Special:UnreviewedPages are not impressing).

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Hm. I was under the impression that one could enable FlaggedRevs on a namespace, but that wouldn't necessarily apply it to all pages on that namespace. Am I wrong? Otherwise, I don't see the problem with allowing main namespace, as long as only currently protected pages actually end up set up to use it. Everything else would remain the same.

Jasper Deng (talkcontribs)

I'm honestly not sure of how exactly the settings work for the extension, but enwiki does use a system that allows flagged revisions to be enabled for only certain pages, off by default.

Nnemo (talkcontribs)

Why should not flagged revisions be extended to one namespace for only one page ?

Fokebox (talkcontribs)

I use special extension that protects just page and that's it )