Thread:Merrystar/@comment-5137743-20140205075821/@comment-11001-20140206050453

Many contributors like to "try out" the wikia before creating an account. So you may lose potential members of your community if they can't make that first edit. And there are many people who do just never choose to make an account for whatever reason, but they can still make postiive contributions.

At the end of the day, protecting lots of pages seems completely unnecessary to me for most wikias. Vandalism can always be undone, the page can be set back to a clean version using the history, and IPs can be blocked if they are causing problems. If an edit war starts, then a short page lock can usually stop it but there's no reason to lock up the page forever.

Of course if there are pages that are repeatedly targeted by vandals over a longer period of time then the semi-protection you mention is fine -- and it's one reason that the option exists. So your "couple of pages" might be fine to protect if the problems are recent, but if the problems were awhile ago then even that might not really be necessary any more.