Wikipedia:Protection policy

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"WP:PP" redirects here. For a list of protected pages, see Wikipedia:Lists of protected pages. For a list of perennial proposals, see Wikipedia:Perennial proposals.
For WikiProject Parliamentary Procedure, see WP:WPPP.
This page documents an official English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that should normally be followed by all editors. Any edit to it should reflect consensus. Consider discussing potential changes on the talk page first.
Shortcuts:
WP:PP
WP:PROTECT
This page in a nutshell: Editing or moving of a page can be restricted by administrators. As Wikipedia is built around the principle that anyone can edit it, this should only be done in certain situations.
Fully Protected
Protected by Office
Semi-Protected
Create Protected
Indefinitely protected
Move Protected


Administrators can protect a page to restrict editing or moving of that page, and remove such protection. Such protection may be indefinite, or expire after a specified time.

  • Full protection prevents editing by everyone except administrators. Fully protected media files cannot be overwritten by new uploads.
  • Semi-protection prevents editing by unregistered contributions and contributors with accounts which are not autoconfirmed.
  • Creation protection prevents a previously deleted page from being recreated.
  • Move protection protects the page solely from moves.

Any type of protection or unprotection may be requested at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. Changes to protected pages should be proposed on the page's discussion page, and carried out once there is consensus to do so. A log of protections and unprotections is available at Special:Log/protect.

Except in the case of office actions (see below), administrators may unprotect a page if the reason for its protection no longer applies, a reasonable period has elapsed, and there is no consensus that continued protection is necessary. Contacting the administrator who originally protected the page is advised in unclear circumstances.

Contents


Full protection

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WP:FULL

A fully protected page may be edited only by administrators. The protection may be of a limited duration, such as 7 or 14 days, or may be indefinite. The edit box for a fully protected page is shaded in red with a warning above it.

Any modification to a fully protected page should be discussed on its talk page or in another appropriate forum. Once consensus has been established for the change, any administrator may make the necessary edits to the protected page. Placing the {{editprotected}} template on the talk page can draw attention to discussions about edits to protected pages.

Content disputes

On pages that are experiencing edit warring, temporary full protection can force the parties to discuss their edits on the talk page, where they can reach consensus. Isolated incidents of edit warring, and persistent edit warring by particular users, may be better addressed by blocking, so as not to prevent normal editing of the page by others.

Policy shortcut:
WP:PREFER

When protecting a page because of a content dispute, administrators normally protect the current version, except where the current version contains content that clearly violates content policies, such as vandalism, copyright violations, or defamation of living persons. Administrators may also revert to an old version of the page predating the edit war if such a clear point exists. Pages that are protected because of content disputes should not be edited except to make changes unrelated to the dispute or to make changes for which there is clear consensus. Administrators should not protect or unprotect a page to further their own position in a content dispute.

Vandalism

Policy shortcut:
WP:NO-PREEMPT

Persistent vandalism, or the possibility of such for high-trafficked articles does not usually provide a basis for full-protection. Preemptive full protection of articles is contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia and this policy. Semi-protection is used for articles, such as Barack Obama, that have a pattern of heavy sustained vandalism. Brief periods of full protection are used, rarely, when a large number of autoconfirmed accounts are used to make a sustained vandalism attack on an article.

"History only" review

If a deleted page is undergoing deletion review, only administrators are normally capable of viewing the former content of the page. If they feel it would benefit the discussion to allow other users to view the page content, administrators may restore the page, blank it or replace the contents with {{TempUndelete}} or a similar notice, and fully protect the page to prevent further editing. The previous contents of the page are then accessible to non-admins via the page history.

Talk-page protection

MediaWiki now supports disabling users editing their own talk pages when blocking. This should be used instead wherever practical, as things like expiry are automatic (And it does not prevent other users from editing the page for typos etc). If the user is using sock puppet accounts, see the instructions below.

Administrators may fully protect the user talk page of a blocked user if the page is being used for continued inappropriate editing by sock puppet accounts of the blocked user. If the user is not using sock puppet accounts, see the instructions above. This includes repeated abuse of the {{unblock}} template, or continued uncivil or offensive remarks. The protection should be timed so as not to exceed the length of the block. If the block is of indefinite duration, then the protection may be likewise.

Office actions

As outlined at Wikipedia:Office actions, pages may be protected by Wikimedia Foundation staff in response to issues such as copyright or libel. Such actions override community consensus. Administrators should not edit or unprotect such pages without permission from Wikimedia Foundation staff. A list of pages under the scrutiny of the Wikimedia Foundation can be found here.

Semi-protection

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WP:SEMI

Semi-protection prevents edits from anonymous users (IP addresses), as well as edits from accounts that are not autoconfirmed (have a four day old account and ten or more edits to Wikipedia).

Administrators may apply indefinite semi-protection to pages which are subject to heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy (such as biographies of living persons, neutral point of view).

In addition, administrators may apply temporary semi-protection on pages that are:

  • Subject to significant but temporary vandalism or disruption (for example, due to media attention) when blocking individual users is not a feasible option.
  • Subject to edit-warring where all parties involved are anonymous or new editors (i.e., in cases in which full-protection would otherwise be applied). This does not apply when autoconfirmed users are involved.
  • Article discussion pages, when they have been subject to persistent disruption. Such protection should be used sparingly because it prevents anonymous and newly registered users from participating in discussions. A page and its talk page should not both be protected at the same time.
  • Talk pages of blocked IP addresses that are being used for continued inappropriate editing, including repeated abuse of the {{unblock}} template, or continued uncivil or offensive remarks. The protection should be timed so as to not exceed the length of the block. Although administrators may also choose to change the block settings to block the user from editing their talk page instead, since there is no need to synchronize the block period with the page protection time period with this method.

Semi-protection should not be used as a pre-emptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred, nor should it be used solely to prevent editing by anonymous and newly registered users. In particular, it should not be used to settle content disputes.

Today's featured article is very rarely semi-protected, despite the increased vandalism that results from its presence on the Main Page, except in particularly serious cases. For guidelines on protecting articles linked from the main page, see Wikipedia:Main Page featured article protection.

The essay Wikipedia:Rough guide to semi-protection contains further information.

User pages

User pages and subpages may be semi-protected, but not fully protected, at the user's request if there is evidence of vandalism or disruption. User talk pages are usually not semi-protected except in response to severe or continued vandalism. Users whose talk page are semi-protected for lengthy or indefinite periods of time should have an unprotected user talk subpage linked conspicuously from their main talk page to allow good faith comments from non-autoconfirmed users.

Deceased users

In the event of the confirmed death of a user then their user page, but not their talk page, should be fully protected as detailed at Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians/Guidelines.

Creation protection

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WP:SALT

Non-existent pages may be protected, for limited periods of time, if they are repeatedly re-created after deletion in line with the deletion policy. Administrators may apply protection to non-existent pages with the same procedure as with all other pages. Such protection is case-sensitive. A list of protected titles may be found at Special:Protectedtitles.

Administrators should not use creation protection as a pre-emptive measure, but only in response to actual events. Pre-emptive restrictions on new article titles should be instituted through the title blacklist system, which allows for more flexible protection, with support for substrings and regular expressions.

Pages that have been creation-protected are sometimes referred to as "salted". Contributors wishing to re-create a salted title with more appropriate content should contact an administrator. As with deletions in general, the matter can also be resolved through the deletion review process.

Permanent protection

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WP:PPINDEF

Some areas of Wikipedia are permanently protected by the MediaWiki software. The MediaWiki namespace, which defines parts of the site interface, is fully protected; administrators cannot remove this protection. In addition, user CSS and JavaScript pages, such as User:Example/monobook.css and User:Example/cologneblue.js, are automatically fully protected. Only accounts that are associated with these pages or administrators are able to edit them. This protection applies to any user subpage with a ".css" or ".js" extension, whether an equivalent MediaWiki skin exists or not. Administrators may modify these pages, for example, to remove a user script that has been used in an inappropriate way.

In addition to the hard-coded protection, administrators may permanently fully protect pages that fall into one of these categories:

Move protection

Policy shortcut:
WP:MOVP

Move-protected pages cannot be moved to a new title except by an administrator. Move protection is commonly applied to:

Fully protected pages are also move-protected.

As with full protection, administrators should avoid favoring one name over another, and protection should not be considered an endorsement of the current name. An obvious exception to this rule is when pages are protected due to page move vandalism.

Other notes

Cascading protection

Cascading protection fully protects a page, and extends that full protection automatically to any page that is transcluded onto the protected page, whether directly or indirectly. This includes images and other media that are hosted on English Wikipedia. Files stored on Commons will not be protected by cascading protection, and need to be temporarily uploaded to English Wikipedia or protected at Commons.

Cascading protection should be used only to prevent vandalism to particularly visible pages such as the Main Page.

Cascading protection is available only for fully protected pages; it is disabled for semi-protected pages as it represents a security flaw. See Bugzilla:8796 for more information.

Cascading protection is not instantaneous; it may be several hours before it takes effect. See Bugzilla:18483 for more information.

Templates

The following templates may be added at the top of a page to indicate that it is protected:

Protection templates
v • d • e
{{pp-meta}} Full Semi Move
Dispute: {{pp-dispute}} N/A {{pp-move-dispute}}
Vandalism: {{pp-vandalism}} {{pp-move-vandalism}}
High visibility templates: {{pp-template}} N/A
User talk of blocked user: {{pp-usertalk}} {{pp-semi-usertalk}} N/A
Sockpuppetry: N/A {{pp-semi-sock}} N/A
Long-term: N/A {{pp-semi-indef}} {{pp-move-indef}}
Generic (other protection): {{pp-protected}} {{pp-move}}
Scrutiny of the Office: {{pp-office}} {{reset}} N/A
Talk page info: {{Permprot}} {{Temprot}} N/A
Create protection: {{pp-create}} N/A

See also

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy"
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