Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/RfC to add Pending Changes to all BLP with few or no watchers/close

There is a consensus against using Pending Changes to pre-emptively protecting BLPs that are under- or un-watched. Some unscientific sampling suggests the vast bulk of our BLPs have five (or perhaps three) or less watchers. The rate at which BLPs get edited and the number of watchers is uncorrelated.

Objections raised included

• the overwhelming of Special:PendingChanges with hundreds of thousands of articles
• the necessary secrecy of the selection of articles
• editors will miss the immediacy of editing an unprotected article, and some new editors will not edit further because of this
• articles should only be protected once a demonstrated need exists
• during the delay caused by reviewing, IP editors will not see subtle vandalism that only they can spot and fix
• the effort involved in reviewing BLP edits is better spent improving other articles
• there's nothing special about BLPs
• having Reviewers approve edits is elitist
• Pending Changes protection is inferior to semi-protection because semi-protection is so difficult only the most determined editor will propose an edit
• active editors should watch BLPs instead of Pending Changes protecting them
• doing this to unwatched BLPs is the thin end of the wedge before doing it to everything

Objections that seemed to be based on a misunderstanding of how Pending Changes works included

• edits to unwatched articles will never be approved
• IPs should not be blocked from editing

Furthermore, if bots were to PC protect articles, they would have to guard against spoofing.