The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a request for adminship that was withdrawn. Please do not modify it.
I am withdrawing this RFA.
Werdna (with the help of a few others) has written a patch for Mediawiki that implements "cascading protection" as an option on the protection page. Once this cascading protection is enabled for the Main Page, it will ensure that any time a template or image is added to the Main Page that the item is automatically protected and that this protection automatically ends once it is removed from the Main Page. Enabling such a scheme in Mediawiki is of course better than any bot could do at the same task. This patch has now been applied to the main development trunk of Mediawiki and should be available on the site "in a few days" following a database update to support it.
While ProtectionBot (may he rest in peace) has certain functionality that exceeds that provided by Werdna's patch, I feel the technical situation has changed too greatly for this RFA to continue to be valid. Consequently, I am choosing to withdraw it at this time.
I would like to thank everyone who has supported this endeavor, especially those who strove to provide valuable feedback into the bot's functionality and smooth the process along. At the same time, I would also like express my clear frustration with this process as a whole. Werdna and a few developers managed to implement a solution to an important problem in a matter of days. I implemented a solution to that same problem and then expended many many times the effort trying to justify and defend that solution through an overly complex process that sometimes seemed to have been invented on the spot. To date, the various ProtectionBot discussions have generated more than 500 kilobytes of text. Or put another way, that's roughly 140 pages at a standard 12 pt font. A good idea, that can be shown to work, should not require this much effort.
Having dumped an unreasonable amount of my time and energy into this during the last two weeks (to the real detriment of other aspects of my life), I am going to take a wikibreak for a while. Hopefully while I'm gone, people will reflect on this experience and try to find a better way.
Lastly, I would encourage people to go thank Werdna for his valuable contribution to the security of Wikipedia.
