Wikipedia:Protection policy

This page is a policy on the Simple English Wikipedia. Many people agree with it. They see it as a standard idea that all users should normally follow. When changing this page (except for minor errors like typos), please check that other people agree with your changes. Use the talk page when you are not sure or when you want to suggest a change.

Shortcuts WP:P WP:PROTECT

Administrators can protect pages to stop them from being changed. They can also unprotect pages. There are five types of protection; full protection, semi-protection, move protection, cascading protection and create protection.^[a]

Full protection stops users from changing pages unless they are administrators. An administrator can set when the protection ends. This gives temporary protection. If there is no time set the page is protected indefinitely.

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 whose account it is and interface administrators can change 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.^[b]

Semi-protection of a page like this stops unregistered changers (IP addresses) and changers with accounts not more than four days old or having less than 10 changes from changing pages. If someone is "autoconfirmed", they are allowed to change a page.

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. A user can also request semi-protection in their userspace if they want it.

Move protection prevents articles from being moved by users unless they are administrators. Move protection includes:

• Continued or ongoing page-move vandalism.
• Page name dispute.
• Articles which have no reason to be moved.

Cascading protection fully protects any page transcluded onto the protected page. Cascading protection cannot be used with semi-protection.

Cascading protection can be used:

• On pages that are seen a lot, like the Main Page when vandalism is frequent.
• To prevent creation of pages that get recreated a lot after being deleted. See protected deleted pages.

Create protection, sometimes called salting, allows administrators to either semi-protect or full-protect pages that have not been made yet, this can also be done by the title blacklist. A list of create-protected pages can be found at Special:Protectedtitles.

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.

• m:Protected pages considered harmful
• Special:Protectedpages
• Protected deleted pages
• Deletion policy