Help:Page protection

Page protection is the ability to limit who can edit a page. Administrators have the ability to both protect and unprotect pages should the need arise.

Uses
The majority of pages on a wiki should remain unprotected to encourage all users in the community to edit. It is against Wikia's Terms of Use to permanently protect large numbers of content pages.

Places where you may want to use protection may include:
 * Protecting frequently vandalized pages, such as the main page on busy communities.
 * Maintaining the integrity of the site's wordmark and favicon.
 * Protecting community policy statements.
 * Templates containing complex code and/or are necessary for a particular wiki.

Temporary protection might be used for:
 * Enforcing a "cool down" period to stop an edit war, upon request.
 * Protecting a page or image that has been a recent target of persistent vandalism.

Protection levels
There are three protection levels that can be chosen.
 * Unprotected: Allows everybody to edit and/or rename the page
 * Semi-protection: prevents an unregistered or non-autoconfirmed user from editing, moving, or creating the page. This protection level is usually sufficient for most purposes, and can be set by choosing "Block new and unregistered users" in the options list.
 * Full protection: limits editing, moving or creating the page to administrators and content moderators. This protection level might be appropriate for a community policy page, wiki wordmark or a favicon.  It can be set by choosing "Administrators and content moderators only" in the options list.

Protection options

 * Edit protection: limits who can edit a page.
 * Move protection: limits who can rename a page. By default the move protection level will match the edit protection level, but they can be set
 * Create protection: limits who can create a page that does not yet exist or has been deleted. This can be useful to prevent repeated creation of unwanted or maliciously named pages.
 * Cascading protection: this option extends full protection to all templates and files included on the page.

Protecting pages

 * To protect a page, photo, template, click on the arrow on the "Edit" button next to the title to produce a dropdown menu. Then click "Protect".
 * On the protection page that then appears, you can set the desired protection level.
 * You may want the page move protection to be set at a different level than the editing protection. By default, they match. To set a different level, select the check box in the "Move" section, then choose which protection level you would like.
 * To set cascading protection, click the check box next to "Protect pages included in this page (cascading protection)"
 * Select a default reason for protection in the dropdown menu, or add in your own reason in the box below.
 * Click "Confirm" to save your changes.

Unprotect

 * To unprotect or change the protection for a specific page, use the Edit button dropdown to visit the protection page for it.
 * Remove or alter the protection options.
 * Click "Confirm" to save your changes.

Cascading Protection


Cascading protection is a form of page protection which allows you to protect a page so that all templates and images on the page will also be protected without needing to protect them individually. This is useful on pages, such as a wiki main page, where most of the included images and templates are used only on that page.

To use cascading protection, just click the "protect" link as usual; cascade protect is there among normal protection options. The page must be fully protected in order to activate cascading protection.

Advice

 * Do not make the common mistake of protecting pages unnecessarily. A single vandalizing edit is not a reason to permanently protect a page against all edits.
 * Page protection levels should make sense. If a page is repeatedly vandalized by IPs, then semi-protection will stop that; full-protection is not necessary.  If two established editors are having an edit war, then temporary full-protection of the page is needed.
 * Most page protections should be temporary, so that they expire when the current problem is past.
 * If IP vandalism is a problem on most or all pages on a wiki, disabling anonymous editing through WikiFeatures is a better solution than mass page protection.
 * Talk pages and user talk pages should not be protected except in extreme circumstances.
 * On a wiki where it is required to have an account in order to edit, be aware that semi-protected pages may not be useful. A majority of the editors on that wiki are likely to already have reached autoconfirmed status.
 * Do not make the mistake of enabling cascading protection on important templates, such as infoboxes or maintenance tags. If this setting is applied to such templates, the pages in which they are used will inherit the protection settings you have applied, which could result in many articles suddenly becoming uneditable by the majority of your community.

Next pages

 * Learn about protecting an entire community.
 * Read the administrators' how-to guide.

Further help and feedback
pt:Ajuda:Proteção de página de:Hilfe:Seitenschutz es:Ayuda:Protección en cascada fr:Aide:Protection de page it:Aiuto:Protezione delle pagine ja:ヘルプ:ページの保護 nl:Help:Paginabeveiliging pl:Pomoc:Zabezpieczanie ru:Справка:Защита страниц vi:Trợ giúp:Bảo vệ trang zh:Help:頁面保護