Wikipedia:Main page featured article stability
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The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".
A proposal's acceptance or rejection is not determined simply by counting votes. |
The current policy regarding protection of the current day's featured article attempts to balance two quite important but competing interests: maintaining the editability of the featured article, and maintaining the integrity of an extremely high visibility article. Rather than having a tradeoff between these two interests through semi-protection, or allowing one interest to be entirely upheld at the expense of the other (as through full protection, or no protection), a fully protected stable version of the day's featured article could be created, and linked directly from the main page. A template on the stable version of the article would direct users to the article itself if they wished to edit the article; the article itself would be left unprotected (except for pagemove protection). The inability to vandalize the high-visibility version of the article linked directly from the main page would deter much vandalism, and would significantly decrease the impact of any vandalism that did occur.
[edit] Implementation possibilities
- Move the article, and its talk page, to (say) "Wikipedia:MPFA/(page name)"
- Copypaste the article to its original title, with a template at the top with the following:
- Featured article star.
- Protection lock.
- "This article is currently featured on the Main Page. It is a protected copy of the original article with this title, which has temporarily been moved here. The article can still be edited at that location, and will be moved back to the original title when it is no longer featured on the main page"
- Fully protect the page.
- Fully protect the redirect at the talk page.
- (optional) At intervals, copypaste non-vandalized revisions from the live version.
- When the page is no longer featured on the main page, move the temporarily-moved "live" pages back to the original location, deleting the temporary copy.
