Wikipedia:Experimental vandalism protection

For the large majority of Wikipedia articles, vandalism is not an unsurmountable problem. However, for those articles which attract the most attention from malicious users, such as George W. Bush, vandalism occurs so frequently that even the dedicated group of editors watching those articles cannot keep up, which reduces the article's usability significantly. Analysis shows that over 90% of recent edits to George W. Bush have been vandalism or reversion of vandalism. Page protection is only a temporary measure against heavy levels of disruption, as one of the core principles of Wikipedia is that (nearly) anyone can edit any article. Here, we propose a system whereby we retain the ability for (nearly) anyone to edit the article while maintaining its usability.

The system is simple. Two copies of the article are maintained. The first is the "original" main article; for example, George W. Bush, hereafter referred to as the main article. The second is kept on a subpage and protected; for lack of a better name, we will use George W. Bush/Supervised, hereafter referred to as the protected article. A boilerplate notice like the following: Template:Evp The main article remains freely editable by anyone; vandalism reversion is still greatly encouraged on it. A taskforce of administrators oversee the protected version. It is generated weekly by taking a snapshot of the main article. Then the taskforce removes any simple vandalism and blatant bad-faith POV and updates their version of the article. The protected article's talk page is used for discussions amongst the members of the taskforce and for inquiries from any user.

In addition, the taskforce members should be disinterested parties, and will refrain from making content edits (that is, anything that isn't vandalism reversion) on the main article.