Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/December 7, 2004

Hi,

This page seems to be protected, but the edit history doesn't list a reason, and Wikipedia:Protected page doesn't list these pages. Is this page protected according to page protection policy? I think that the word "Palladianism" should be "Palladian" in the second sentence; I changed that in the article yesterday, but I wasn't able to change it for the front page. I'm worried about having persistent grammatical or spelling errors on subpages of the Main page. -- Creidieki 04:20, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and made the change you wanted. The reason for the protection is that for about the last 6 months (since the main page got its facelift), the templates which display the main page content have been unprotected, and a security-through-obscurity scheme pretty much became the de-facto standard. However, as people have become accustomed to templates, this scheme has broken down, and the amount of vandalism has been increasing. Late last month, the featured article blurb was the subject of repeated, highly offensive vandalism (someone overwrote the image with the goatse pic). After that, I decided to start protecting the templates regularly when I wrote the blurbs. Others have started protecting the images too. →Raul654 04:38, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)