Feed The Beast Wiki:Protected page

Administrators can protect and unprotect pages, including ones that do not exist. Protection restricts page editing and/or moving to only a certain group of users, such as autoconfirmed users, contribs or admins.

The majority of pages 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 or abusive re-creation.

Uses

• Protecting highly vandalised pages, such as the Main Page or guidelines.
• Maintaining the integrity of technical site elements, such as the logo or favicon.
• Maintaining the integrity of key copyright and license pages.
• Preventing repeatedly created vandal or spam pages from creation. See Special:ProtectedTitles
• Protecting the interface and system messages in the MediaWiki namespace (these are protected automatically)

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:someone/carbon.css or User:someone/common.js. Only the accounts associated with these pages (and admins) are able to edit them.

Usage

Admins can protect pages using the "Protect" or "Change protection" links at the top of a page. Various protection levels are available:

• Allow all users, or no protection, means that any anonymous or logged-in user can modify the page. This is the default protection level for any page
• Allow only autoconfirmed users, or semi-protected, means that only autoconfirmed users can modify the page. User accounts are autoconfirmed after being at least four days old and having made at least 10 edits. This kind of protection is useful for pages that suffer from frequent vandalism by anonymous users.
• Allow contributors and administrators means that only users in the contrib user group can modify the page. This level of protection should be used for pages with a high risk of vandalism, such as the Main Page.
• Allow only administrators, or full protection, means that only administrators can modify the page. This protection level should only be used for pages that are too risky for contrib protection and rarely have to be edited. This kind of protection is automatically enforced on all pages in the MediaWiki namespace.

Using the checkbox labelled "Unlock further protect options" a different protection level can be specified for page moving. This is however only rarely necessary, as page moving is already restricted to the contrib group.

Pages can also be cascade protected, this will cause all images, pages, or templates transcluded onto the page to be fully protected, even if the main article is only semi-protected. This is used to avoid indirect modifications to a protected page by modifying a transcluded page or image.

Rules

• Pages should never be protected without a reason. Protection because of potential vandalism should only be enforced on pages such as the Main Page or important templates. Other pages should only be protected because of vandalism if it has already occurred commonly.
• Protection should not be used to the advantage of a person or group involved in an editing dispute, such as to lock in a revision that an admin prefers. Instead, the page should be reverted to a revision before the editing dispute and then protected, if possible.
• User or talk pages should not be protected, unless they are subject of extreme vandalism.