We currently have over 800 protected questions. Some have been protected since 2011.
Isn't it time we unprotected questions that have been protected for longer than, say, a year?
I see protecting a question as a temporary measure, to let a question cool down a bit. Once it has cooled down and is no longer likely to attract low quality answers by new or drive-by users, there's no need for it to be protected any longer.
... for exactly the same reason they were protected originally: they attracted low-quality answers before and would be likely to attract them again. E.g. this question with 10 deleted answers over the course of three years: if we unprotected it now, it would probably just keep on attracting bad answers until it got protected again.
There are rare cases of questions protected because they're the target of concentrated troll attack (like this question with 11 near-identical answers in one day), and those can be unprotected once the attack is over. Or, perhaps slightly less rarely, questions protected because they attract many bad answers in a short period while they're on HNQ (or maybe for some other reason - HNQ isn't necessarily the root of all evil). Again, if the low-quality answers are tied to a particular time period rather than to the nature of the question itself, feel free to unprotect.
But in most cases, a question is protected because it's the kind of question that attracts bad answers, for whatever reason (of course this doesn't necessarily make it a bad question), regardless of the passing of time. These questions almost certainly shouldn't be unprotected.
(This answer is mostly based on an explanation I already gave to @Gallifreyan in chat.)
HNQ isn't necessarily the root of all evil. Uh, well, I talked to some of the Old Ones, and they say they spawned from HNQ, and that it was really HNQ that tempted Eve in Eden. So, you're clearly wrong, there.
To add to what's been said, a lot of your perspective on Protected changes after you hit 10k and you can see the deletions. When you go to a popular Protected question and you see the wreckage... you begin to understand why it exists.
And why it's rarely removed.
Understand that a lot of new people come to the site (especially when they're in the Hot list) and they want to just gush on the topic. Hot simply exacerbates the problem. You want to at least raise the bar to keep the totally new out, lest they make for moderation work. Wanting to reduce this is NOT a bad thing. I'm continually impressed that SF.SE keeps the moderation to a minimum. I'd like to see it stay that way.
Just in case - here's a query to find all the protected questions, even if you don't have 10k powers yet.
This FAQ main meta post reads:
- Do unprotect questions that aren’t currently attracting a lot of attention and don’t have a long history of unproductive answers.
And to quote some bits quoted in my other answer on this topic:
Judicious use of this feature is critical to allowing these sites to handle large amounts of external attention, but over-using it breaks the system: Stack Exchange sites depend on a constant influx of new blood, both to answer new questions and provide updated information on old ones. When in doubt, err on the side of letting new users prove themselves before locking them out.
Changes and guidelines for the Protected Question status on Stack Overflow Blog
It seems to be more or less official policy that protection is not meant to be permanent, and that it should be used to deter only multiple bad questions in short periods of time.
There have been plenty of reasons given (in linked posts) that protection is in a sense against the spirit of Stack Exchange, which relies on new users and their answers.
I sincerely doubt all ~800 questions have to stay protected to this date. Protection, in my opinion, should be used when there's an influx of bad answers or non-answers that is easier to block altogether than to handle via review queue. In this case I think we are more than capable of handling new answers to old questions, since we are not expecting them to flood the site.
Note also that bad answers are still answers (which has been discussed in chat recently and prompted this question by Mithrandir: When should 20kers vote to delete an answer?). They can be improved, if not by the poster, then by us, and they would still be valuable.
The age of the question, the number of deleted answers, and the nature of the question is what I think should be taken into account:
Questions from the beginning of time (2011) should probably be unprotected - their age of glory has passed, and it's unlikely we'll experience a flood of bad answers for them.
Questions with few deleted or low-quality answers should probably be unprotected - if they didn't attract bad answers then, why should they do so now?
Questions with touchy subjects, or questions that are prone to "enthusiastic" fan answers, a la the "Cap vs. Spidey" question, which got a lot of answers comparing the two characters instead of listing occurrences of them fighting.
