Wikipedia has had to lock down the Silent Hill 2 Remake page after repeated vandalism from editors who refuse to accept that the remake of Konami’s seminal horror game released to critical acclaim earlier this week.
Outright lies around the games reception and metacritic score - including one edit that said the game had “received the worst reviews imaginable” - means the page has now been put into a semi-protected state to stop unregistered users from making wild, unsubstantiated claims, including one that said Eurogamer had awarded it 0/5 stars when, in fact, it got top marks.
It’s unclear what’s motivating the edits, although its presumed by some to have been fuelled by the nauseating discourse that the game is “woke” because of changes made to the characters facial features and clothing.
Alternatively, it may stem from some fans’ dismayed that Silent Hill 2 has been remade by Bloober Teamor, indeed, at all.
Point of clarification: the article was semi-protected, and “locked” is an oversimplistic description of it (understandable, since a lot of people who report on Wikipedia don’t really understand how it works). Technically there’s a way to lock a page such that only the Wikimedia Foundation staff can edit it, but realistically, full protection (i.e. only administrators and those above them can edit it) is probably the closest thing to a proper “lock” that ever gets used.
Semi-protection (the grey lock with a little person in it) just means that you need to be autoconfirmed (technically confirmed works too, but that system is basically disused). If you’re autoconfirmed, that means you’ve made at least 10 edits on Wikipedia and your account is at least 4 days old – an extremely low bar to clear that largely keeps out spam from IP addresses and sockpuppet accounts. The semi-protection on this article is set to expire in three days.
There’s also extended protection (the blue lock with an ‘E’ on it) that you’ll generally see on highly contentious topics such as ultra-high-profile political figures, enormously contentious disputes between nations (Russia–Ukraine, Israel–Palestine, and India–Pakistan, to name a few), and then some miscellaneous ones like ‘Atlantic Records’ and ‘Whopper’ (the latter was because Burger King launched an ad which is designed to trigger your Android device to read out the first part of the Wikipedia article, making it red meat for vandals). This requires an account to have at least 500 edits and be at least 30 days old.