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If you have cruised through Wikipedia's articles, pages, images, or other areas where the content was tied up in arbitration, vandalism sprees, edit wars, or generally considered to be controversial odds are good that you've encountered one of the various multicolored padlocks located on the upper right hand side of a Wikipedia page. For most established users, these padlocks serve merely as a checkpoint to help screen out problematic editors, but for unregistered or very new users these padlocks can be a very frustrating sight on the article circuit because they indicate that the page in question has been protected.

Page protection can be applied to any page here on Wikipedia, but it is most often associated with problematic articles and certain high-profile Wikipedia pages. While anyone can request in good faith that a page be protected only those who possess administrative rights can officially protect or unprotect a page here on Wikipedia. To better understand page protection and issues surrounding it this essay will serve as a basic walkthrough of the levels of protection, where to request a page be protected or unprotected, and touch briefly on the role of administrators in the process. It does not, however, replace the site-wide guidance found at WP:Protection policy, which should be deferred to in all instances.

Page protection levels at a glance[edit]

See also: Wikipedia:Protection policy

Because Wikipedia prides itself on being the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" protecting a page should always be considered a last resort. It leaves people unable to edit the page in question, and it may create ill feelings about the site. As a result, page protection is governed by the Wikipedia's protection policy, which lays out the do's and dont's of page protection.

Broadly speaking, the following levels of protection and the cause for their implementation are listed below:

Fully protected
Fully protected
Fully protected
Semi-protected
Semi-protected
Semi-protected
Extended confirmed-protected
Extended confirmed-protected
Extended confirmed-protected
Pending changes protected
Pending changes protected
Pending changes protected
Create protected
Create protected
Create protected
Move protected
Move protected
Move protected
Upload protected
Upload protected
Upload protected
Permanently protected
Permanently protected
Permanently protected
Protected by Office
Protected by Office
Protected by office

Requesting page protection[edit]

At some point in every Wikipedian's history a user feels that a page that he or she edits, patrols, or otherwise keeps tabs on reaches a point in its history where some level of page projection may be warranted. When these situations arise editors take their concerns to the Requests for page protection page, listing the article they wish to see protected, the reason they are requesting the protection (bearing in mind that the request must fall under one of the protection policy criteria in order to be counted as valid), and including a short comment intended to provide some context for the request (for example, "article constantly being vandalized", "article repeatedly being recreated" etc.).

Once you have added your request, administrators will review your petition and either protect the page or deny the request. In the case of the former, the log will note that the page is protected even if no template is visible on the page announcing that the page in question is protected. In the case of the latter, the admin in question who denied the protection request will usually have given a reason for his or her refusal to protect the page at present. In such cases you are free to represent the petition provided that the new request for page protection takes into account the reason listed for being rejected in the statement.

Page protection from an administrator's perspective[edit]

When protecting a page administrators are called on to avoid exercising favoritism, so the protecting admin usually refrains from employing protection on pages they edit to avoid a perception that they have personal interest in protecting a specific version of the page in question. Keep this in mind if you make a direct request to a Milhist admin to protect a problematic page (as opposed to posting a central request at WP:RPP). Additionally, admins are required to ensure that page protection is employed on a version of the page that is judged to be vandalism-free. This can be difficult when the vandalism is quite subtle, or the topic requires subject specific knowledge. As a rule, regardless of which version of a page an admin protects, it is going to be the "wrong" version in someone's opinion (i.e. some remaining vandalism, omitting some important information etc.) so cut the protecting admin some slack if he or she misses a few minor details.

In addition to determining the type of protection to be employed the protecting administrator will set a timer for how long the protection lasts. Once the page is protected, the protection timer will tick down until the proverbial "ding", at which point the protection will auto-expire and the page will be open to all to edit again. As a rule, administrators will protect a page only long enough to resolve the underlying issues, so the protecting admin will set the protection to last for as long as they think it will be necessary for the identified problem(s) to be resolved. Most of the time, the issue(s) that resulted in page protection are resolved in a few days or a few weeks, but if the protection lasts more than a month then you made need to raise the underlying article issues at the mediation page, or in a worse case scenario, requests for arbitration to resolve the problem(s).

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ From Wikipedia:User access levels: "A number of actions on the English Wikipedia are restricted to user accounts that pass certain thresholds of age (time passed since the first edit) and edit count: users who meet these requirements are considered part of the pseudo-group 'autoconfirmed'. Autoconfirmed status is checked every time a user performs a restricted action: it is then granted automatically by the software. The precise requirements for autoconfirmed status vary according to circumstances: for most users on English Wiki accounts the following must (usually) take place: that they are both more than four days old and have made at least 10 edits are considered autoconfirmed. However, users with IPBE editing through the Tor network are subjected to stricter autoconfirmed thresholds: 90 days and 100 edits."
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