[uncomputation]

This is a good and sad point. I was on the wiki page for derivatives and found it was locked due to vandalism. On one hand, we don’t want pages locked because that defeats the point. On the other, how do we stop every troll high schooler who just learned derivatives and messes up the wiki page for lulz? We either need active watchers (surprisingly and fortunately pretty easy, wiki editors are a passionate and eagle-eyed group, but I wonder how long and how much of this is just the initial hard core fans from the early days) or to have some deterrent to vandalism in the first place. For some, maybe this is IP address logging (although as someone else noted in the thread, at what point does this sink anonymity?). For others, maybe creating an account. In practice, neither of these work 100% of the time. I have seen vandals from both IP accounts and registered accounts in about equal frequency.

[Gigachad]

I don’t think it really matters. Wikipedia has surprisingly strict standards and traditions that aren’t very intuitive. If you as a brand new user attempted to edit the page for Donald Trump or Apple, there is a close to 0% chance your edit would not be reverted anyway. These pages are highly curated and there is minimal value you can add to them as a new user. So the semi lock almost just stops people wasting their time.

Much better to start off editing your local country town which has no power users patrolling and tends to be significantly out of date.