Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-2194058-20140616043653/@comment-5454372-20140617144936

GOPLAYNOW wrote: They are allowed to it is just bad form. Somewhat grey area there, though Wikia has made their disapproval of it fairly clear (no-one's disputing that they've got the capabilities to do it though).

There's nothing that directly mentions protecting all pages on the Terms of Use, but the "User Conduct" section states the following:

Wikia Terms of Use: You agree that you will not use the Service in any manner that is contrary to the Wiki Creation Policy, currently found at http://www.wikia.com/Wiki_Creation_Policy, which may be updated from time to time.

The Wiki Creation Policy doesn't explicitly say that protecting all pages is a breach of policy, but their stance against it is clear enough. That's really all that's needed: they've made it clear that it's against the spirit of their policies -- policies are just guidelines which attempt to capture and define that spirit.

I've never been fond of purely legalistic interpretations -- that's when you get rules and laws being distorted against their original purposes (e.g. banned users complaining that they technically did not use a swearword, when their intention and meaning was still perfectly clear through their censored symbols).