Wikibooks:Protection policy

In some circumstances, pages may need to be protected from modification by certain groups of editors. Pages are protected when there is disruption that cannot be prevented through other means such as blocks. This policy describes the protection types and how this ability is only to be used in limited circumstances.

Protection is a technical restriction applied only by administrators, although any user may request protection. Protection can be indefinite or can expire after a specified time. The various levels of protection can be applied to the page edit, page move, page create, and file upload actions. Even when a page is protected from editing, the source wikitext of the page can still be viewed and copied by anyone.

A protected page is marked at its top right by a padlock icon, usually added by the {{pp-protected}} template.

Any protection applied to a page involves setting a type, level, and duration as follows:

• Edit protection protects the page from being edited.
• Move protection protects the page solely from moves.
• Creation protection prevents a page (normally a previously deleted one) from being created.

• Semi-protection prevents editing by unregistered users and users whose accounts are not autoconfirmed.
• Full protection prevents editing by everyone except administrators. Fully protected media files cannot be overwritten by new uploads.

• Protection can be applied for either a specified period or indefinitely.
• The duration is generally determined by the severity and persistence of the disruption, with some exceptions for specific cases.

Semi-protected pages cannot be edited by unregistered users (temporary accounts) or by accounts that are not confirmed/autoconfirmed. Such users can request edits to a semi-protected page by proposing them on its discussion page, using the {{editprotected}} template if necessary to gain attention.

Administrators may apply indefinite semi-protection to pages that are subject to heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy (such as neutral point of view). Semi-protection should not be used as a preemptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred, nor should it be used solely to prevent editing by anonymous and newly registered users.

In addition, administrators may apply temporary semi-protection on pages that are:

• Subject to significant but temporary vandalism or disruption when blocking individual users is not a feasible option.
• Subject to edit-warring where all parties involved are anonymous or new editors (i.e. in cases where full-protection would otherwise be applied). This does not apply when autoconfirmed users are involved.
• Discussion pages, when they have been subject to persistent disruption. Such protection should be used sparingly because it prevents anonymous and newly registered users from participating in discussions. A page and its discussion page should not both be protected at the same time.
• Discussion pages of blocked IP addresses that are being used for continued inappropriate editing, including repeated abuse of the {{unblock}} template, or continued uncivil or offensive remarks. The protection should be timed so as to not exceed the length of the block. However, administrators may also choose to change the block settings to block the user from editing their discussion page instead, since there is no need to synchronize the block period with the page protection time period with this method.

A fully protected page cannot be edited or moved by anyone except administrators.

Changes to a fully protected page should be proposed on the corresponding discussion page (or in another appropriate forum). After consensus has been established for the change, or if the change is uncontroversial, any administrator may make the necessary edits to the protected page. Placing the {{editprotected}} template on the discussion page will draw the attention of administrators for implementing uncontroversial changes.

On pages that are experiencing edit warring, temporary full protection can induce the parties to discuss their edits on the discussion page, where they can reach consensus. Isolated incidents of edit warring, and persistent edit warring by particular users, may be better addressed with blocks, so as not to prevent normal editing of the page by others. If clearly inappropriate content is the subject of an edit war, it is best to block or ban those who are violating the content policies and not those who are enforcing them.

When protecting a page because of a content dispute, administrators normally protect the current version, except where the current version contains content that clearly violates content policies, such as vandalism or copyright violations. Since protecting the most current version sometimes rewards edit warring by establishing a contentious revision, administrators may also revert to an old version of the page predating the edit war if such a clear point exists. Pages that are protected because of content disputes should not be edited except to make changes which are uncontroversial or for which there is clear consensus. Administrators should not protect or unprotect a page to further their own position in a content dispute.

Preemptive full protection of pages is contrary to the open nature of Wikibooks. Brief periods of full protection are used in rare cases when a large number of autoconfirmed accounts are used to make a sustained vandalism attack on a page, which often breaks the attack and causes the accounts to give up and find something more constructive to do. Persistent vandalism, or the possibility of future vandalism for highly trafficked pages, rarely provides a basis for full-protection. Semi-protection is used for pages that have a pattern of heavy sustained vandalism.

If a deleted page is undergoing deletion review, only administrators are normally capable of viewing the former content of the page. If they feel it would benefit the discussion to allow other users to view the page content, administrators may restore the page, blank it or replace the contents with {{rfu}} or a similar notice, and fully protect the page to prevent further editing. The previous contents of the page are then accessible to non-admins via the page history.

Edit protection restricts editing of a page, often due to vandalism or content disputes.

Administrators can prevent the creation of a page through the protection interface. This is useful for pages that have been deleted but repeatedly recreated by an editor. Such protection is case-sensitive. A list of protected titles may be found at Special:ProtectedTitles.

Preemptive restrictions on new page titles are instituted through the title blacklist system, which allows for more flexible protection with support for substrings and regular expressions.

Contributors wishing to re-create a protected title with more appropriate content should contact an administrator or use the deletion review process.

Move-protected pages cannot be moved to a new title except by an administrator. Move protection is commonly applied to:

• Pages subject to persistent page-move vandalism.
• Pages subject to a page-name dispute.
• Highly visible pages that have no reason to be moved, such as the reading room.

Fully protected pages are also automatically move-protected, as moving a page counts as editing it.

As with full protection, administrators should avoid favoring one name over another, and protection should not be considered an endorsement of the current name. An obvious exception to this rule is when pages are protected due to page-move vandalism.

Cascading protection fully protects a page, and extends that full protection automatically to any page that is transcluded onto the protected page, whether directly or indirectly. This includes templates, images, and other media that are hosted on the English Wikibooks. Files stored on Commons are not protected by any other wiki's cascading protection and, if they are to be protected, must be either temporarily uploaded to the English Wikibooks or explicitly protected at Commons (whether manually or through cascading protection there). Cascading protection:

• Should be used only to prevent vandalism when placed on particularly visible pages, such as the main page.
• Is available only for fully protected pages; it is disabled for lower levels of protection as it represents a workflow flaw.
• Is not instantaneous; it can be several hours before it takes effect. See phab:T20483 for more information.
• Should generally not be applied directly to templates or modules, as it will not protect transclusions inside <includeonly> tags or transclusions that depend on template parameters, but will protect the documentation subpage.

Some pages on Wikibooks are subject to software-enforced protection that administrators cannot change or remove. This is called permanent or indefinite protection, and interface protection in the case of CSS and JavaScript pages. Specifically, this applies to:

• Creating, modifying, moving, deleting, or undeleting pages located within the MediaWiki namespace, which defines parts of the entire site's interface, is restricted to administrators and interface administrators.

• Creating, modifying, moving, deleting, or undeleting system-wide CSS and JavaScript pages, such as MediaWiki:common.js, is further restricted to interface administrators.

• Creating, modifying, moving, or undeleting any personal CSS or JavaScript pages located within an account's user space, such as User:Example/monobook.css and User:Example/cologneblue.js, are restricted to the associated user and interface administrators. Interface administrators can modify these pages to remove a user script that has been used in an inappropriate way.
• Creating, modifying, moving, deleting, or undeleting any JSON pages located within an account's user space, such as User:Example/data.json, is restricted to the associated user, administrators, and interface administrators.

As outlined in Foundation:Policy:Office actions § Use of advanced rights by Foundation staff, pages can be protected by Wikimedia Foundation staff in response to issues such as copyright infringement or libel. Such actions override community consensus. Administrators should not edit or unprotect such pages without permission from Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Discussion page archives normally should not be edited, except to revert vandalism to the archive or to repair mistakes involving the {{talkarchive}} template. Therefore, they should normally be fully protected, and any changes should be looked over by another administrator and either kept or reverted.

Highly visible templates used on an extremely large number of pages or substituted with great frequency may be semi- or fully protected based on the degree of visibility, type of use, content, and other factors.

Semi- and fully protected templates should normally have the {{documentation}} template. It loads the unprotected /doc page, so that non-admins and unregistered users can edit the documentation, categories and interwiki links. It also automatically adds {{pp-template}} to protected templates, which displays a small padlock in the top right corner and categorizes the template as a protected template. Only manually add {{pp-template}} to protected templates that don't use {{documentation}} (mostly the stub and flag templates).

User discussion pages are rarely protected, and are semi-protected for short durations only in the most severe cases of vandalism from unregistered users.

Users whose discussion page is semi-protected for lengthy or indefinite periods of time should have an unprotected user discussion subpage linked conspicuously from their main discussion page to allow good faith comments from non-autoconfirmed users.

Blocked users' user pages and user discussion pages should not ordinarily be protected, as this interferes with the user's ability to contest their block through the normal process. In extreme cases of abuse, such as abuse of the {{unblock}} template, the discussion page may be protected for a short time to prevent abusive editing. When required, it should be implemented for a brief period which should not exceed the length of the block or six months, whichever is shorter.

Base user pages (for example, the page User:Example, and not User talk:Example) are automatically protected from creation or editing by unconfirmed accounts and unregistered users. An exception is that unconfirmed registered users are allowed to create or edit their own user page. Unregistered users and unconfirmed accounts are also unable to create or edit user pages that do not belong to a currently registered account. This protection is enforced by an edit filter.

User pages and subpages may be protected at the user's request, especially if there is evidence of vandalism or disruption.

In the event of the confirmed death of a user, the user's user page (but not their discussion page) should be fully protected.

Retired users may have their user pages protected upon request. Discussion pages of retired editors are not usually protected except with limited duration to deal with vandalism. A user's request to have their own discussion page protected due to retirement is not a sufficient rationale to protect the page.

Sandboxes should also not ordinarily be protected since their purpose is to let new users test and experiment with wiki syntax. The sandbox is automatically cleaned every 24 hours, although they tend to be overwritten by other testing users much faster than that. Those who do use the sandboxes for malicious purposes, or to violate policies such as no personal attacks, be civil, and copyrights, should instead be warned and/or blocked.

The following templates may be added at the very top of a page to indicate that it is protected:

• Wikibooks policies