Topic on Wikidata talk:Requests for comment/semi-protection to prevent vandalism on most used Items

Only loosely related to this RfC draft: as statistical overview how we use page protection in Wikidata.

• Since the beginning of Wikidata in October 2012, administrators have used page protection in main namespace (items) for ~5200 times (on average 2.3 times per day)
• However, almost 3000 of these protections have been applied by User:Abián in four batches (plus a couple of individual protections for the same reason) since September 2018. Details: country items on 27 September, some head of states on 31 October, some hundred "high risk items" on 9 January, and most of the rest on 26 January. Without Abián's protections, there would have been ~2200 item protections since Wikidata was set up, which is a little less than one per day on average.
• Without the protections applied by User:Abián recently, we have around 130 items which are indefinitely semi-protected as of now 1. There has been excessive vandalism in (most of) those cases.

I think it would be good also to have some indicative quantification of "Excessive vandalism" (I would add a question in the RfC), and perhaps it would be good to create some automatic connection between this indicative quantification (e.g. a certain number of rollbacks in a certain period of time) and page protection. Example: after the 5th rollback in 2 months, the page is automatically indefinitely protected. @Abián: What do you think?

I disagree on the quantification of "excessive vandalism" (as someone who otherwise likes making things well-defined), because there are qualitative factors to assess when making such page protections. Recently, I made many such protections in the user and user talk spaces because of an LTA adding very gross things; the same amount of benign vandalism would probably not warrant an "excessive vandalism" protection.

The severity of the vandalism is just as important as the amount when deciding to protect.

(Edit conflict) The RfC is just about semi-protecting Items according to their usage, it's important that we don't extend the scope too much so that people don't digress and some clear conclusions can be drawn from the process. Anyway, I'm not very enthusiastic about fully automating administrator decision making but, hey, rather than protecting automatically, I think it would be great if some tool notified us of persistent vandalism or edit wars (for example, by adding requests to the administrators' noticeboard) so that we could act quickly. :D

Certainly my proposal would regard only items, not other namespaces. Automating the process for high number of vandalisms in a short period of time doesn't exclude that administrators can also apply protections in other cases. Anyway, we can also not insert a question about this topic.

More specifically but generally, I do not advocate for protecting pages without a demonstrated need to do so. No nontrivial metric will have no "false positives" without being unduly restrictive (and thus not of much use).