User blog:TK-999/Page protection

One of the powers available to administrators and bureaucrats is page protection, which they can use to prevent certain contributors from editing a page. In this tutorial, I will explain the methods of doing this.

Technical aspects
There are three levels on protection:
 * No protection,
 * Unregistered and/or new users (account is less than 3 days old) may not edit&mdash;"semi-protection,"
 * Only administrators and bureaucrats can edit&mdash;"full protection."

You can configure protection levels for both editing and moving. By default, the values are automatically equalized, but you can set up different tiers for them by checking the box between the two panels. You may choose to apply so-called cascading protection, which fully protects all templates that are used on the page.

Social aspects
Protections are a significant action, so a rationale is needed before they are executed. Typically, semi-protections&mdash;which are often accompanied by full move-protection&mdash;are the result of persistent vandalism from unregistered contributors, while full protections are applied to stop edit wars between users or to maintain the integrity of key templates. Cascading protection is very rare and typically used on main pages, which have multiple content areas stored in separate templates.

Permanent protection
Pages in the MediaWiki namespace are fully protected by default, since the code stored therein is critical to wiki operations. Users' personal .bbk, .css and .js pages are automatically protected so that only the user and administrators can edit them.

I hope this tutorial was helpful!