Community Central:Protection

Administrators can protect and unprotect pages. Protection of a page or image means that a non-admin cannot edit or move it.

The majority of pages on all Wikia should remain publicly editable, and not protected. Pages may, however, be temporarily or permanently protected for legal reasons (for example, license texts should not be changed) or in cases of extreme vandalism or edit warring.

Uses

 * Protecting highly vandalised pages, such as the Main Page on large wikis.
 * Maintaining the integrity of the site's logo and favicon.
 * Maintaining the integrity of key copyright and license pages.
 * Maintaining the integrity of past press releases.
 * Protecting the often-used texts in the MediaWiki namespace (these are protected automatically).
 * Protecting documents such as minutes or policies that have gone through a formal approval process.

A temporary protection is 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 or persistent edits by a banned user.

There is no need to protect personal css and js pages like user/monobook.css or user/cologneblue.js. Only the accounts associated with these pages (and admins) are able to edit them.

Less than full protection


The MediaWiki software now lets administrators pick several options short of full protection. These are good for temporary protection, particularily when resisting persistent vandalism or repeated spam. You might also want to use these to reduce vandalism on high-profile pages (such as featured articles or highly used templates), while still allowing as many legitimate users as possible to edit.

Full protection is when only administrators (sysops) can move or edit a page. Most pages should be not protected, meaning that default settings apply to both moving and editing.

Rules

 * 1) Do not make the common mistake of protecting pages unnecessarily. For example, do not protect a page simply because it is the main page.
 * 2) Do not edit or revert a temporarily protected page except to add a notice explaining the page is protected.
 * 3) Do not protect a page you are involved in an edit dispute over. Admin powers are not editor privileges - admins should only act as servants to the user community at large.
 * 4) Avoid favoring one version of the article over another, unless one version is vandalism.
 * 5) Temporarily protected pages should not be left protected for very long.
 * 6) Talk pages and user talk pages are not protected except in extreme circumstances.
 * 7) The protection of a page on any particular version is not meant to express support for that version and requests should therefore not be made that the protected version be reverted to a different one.