Wikipedia:Protection policy

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This page documents an official English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.
Shortcuts:
WP:PPOL
WP:PROT
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
Semi-Protected
Create Protected
Move Protected
Indefinitely protected
Protected by Office

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 disables editing for everyone except administrators. Fully protected media files cannot be overwritten by new uploads.
  • Semi-protection disables editing for 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

A fully protected page may only be edited by administrators. The protection may be of a limited duration, such as seven or 14 days, or may expire at a certain time.

Any modification to a fully protected page should be discussed on its talk page or 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 which 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 which clearly violates content policies, such as obvious vandalism or copyright violations. Pages protected due to 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.

"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

Administrators may fully protect the user talk page of a blocked user if the page is being used for continued inappropriate editing. 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

Policy shortcut:
WP:SEMI

Semi-protection prevents edits from anonymous users (IP addresses), or from accounts which are not autoconfirmed. Administrators may apply indefinite semi-protection to pages which are:

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

  • Subject to significant but temporary vandalism or disruption, for example due to media attention, when blocking individual users is not a feasible option.
  • Article discussion pages, when they have been subject to persistent disruption. Such protection should be employed sparingly as 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 which 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 not to exceed the length of the block.

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. See Wikipedia:Main Page featured article protection for guidelines on protecting articles linked from the main page.

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

Creation protection

Non-existent pages may be protected, for any length of time, if they are repeatedly re-created following 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-insensitive. 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 which have been creation-protected are sometimes referred to as "salted", after the process of salting the earth. 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

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 associated with these pages and their 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 which has been used in an inappropriate way.

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

Move protection

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

By default, fully protected pages are also move-protected. If a protected page is moved by an administrator, the page will be protected at the new location, but the redirect remaining at the original location will not be 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.

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.

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

Cascading protection is only available for fully protected pages; it is disabled for semi-protected pages as it represents a security flaw. See Bugzilla:8796 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
Dispute: {{pp-dispute}} N/A
Vandalism: {{pp-vandalism}} {{pp-semi-vandalism}}
High visibility templates: {{pp-template}} {{pp-semi-template}}
User talk of blocked user: {{pp-usertalk}} {{pp-semi-usertalk}}
Spambot target: N/A {{pp-semi-spambot}}
Sockpuppetry: N/A {{pp-semi-sock}}
Long-term: N/A {{pp-semi-indef}}
Generic (other protection): {{pp-protected}} {{pp-semi-protected}}
Scrutiny of the Office: {{pp-office}} {{reset}}
Move protection (disputes): {{pp-move}}
Move protection (vandalism): {{pp-move-vandalism}}
Create protection: {{pp-create}}
Talk page info: {{Permprot}} {{Temprot}}

See also