Wikipedia:Protection policy
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
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This page is an official policy on the Simple English Wikipedia. Many people agree with it. They see it as a standard way that all users should follow. When changing the page, please check that the other people agree with your changes. Use the talk page when you are not sure or when you want to propose a change. |
Administrators can protect pages to stop them from being edited, they can also unprotect pages. There are five types of protection; Full protection, Semi-protection, Move protection, Cascading protection and Create protection, these can be limited to only administrators editing them or users whose accounts are older than four days.
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[change] Full protection
Full protection prevents editing from users unless they are administrators. An administrator can set when the protection expires; this gives temporary protection. If there is no time set the page is protected indefinitely, until it is unprotected.
Indefinite protections can be used for:
- Pages that are likely to be vandalised a lot, like the Main Page.
- The site's logo, press releases, and key copyright and license pages, for legal reasons.
- Personal css and js pages; these are automatically fully protected by the MediaWiki software. Only the user who's account it is and administrators can edit them.
Temporary full protections can be used for:
- Enforcing a time to stop an edit war.
- Preventing abuse of the {{unblock}} template or other disruptions by a blocked user on their user talk page.
[change] Semi-protection
Semi-protection of a page stops unregistered editors (IP addresses) and editors with accounts newer than four days from editing pages.
Semi-protection should only be used if it is the only option left available to solve the problem of vandalism of the page. It is to be used in response to serious and repeated vandalism, such as when certain pages suddenly become the target of repeated vandalism because of current events, are being linked from a high-traffic website, or are affected by evasive vandals.
[change] Move protection
Move protection prevents articles from being moved by users unless they are administrators. Move protection can be used for:
- Continued or on-going page-move vandalism.
- Page name dispute.
- Articles which have no reason to be moved.
[change] Cascading protection
Cascading protection fully protects any page transcluded onto the protected page. Cascading protection can not be used with semi-protection.
Cascading protection is can be used:
- On pages that are seen a lot, like the Main Page.
- To prevent creation of pages that get recreated a lot after being deleted. See protected deleted pages.
[change] Create protection
Create protection allows administrators to either semi-protect or full-protect pages that have not been made yet, this can also be done by the Titleblacklist. A list of create-protected pages can be found at Special:Protectedtitles.
[change] Unprotection
Any admin can unprotect a page. When a page is protected admins can set a time for when the protection expires, when the time is up the page is automatically unprotected.
