Wikipedia:Protection policy

"WP:PP" redirects here. You may be looking for Wikipedia:Requests for page protection, Wikipedia:Lists of protected pages, Wikipedia:Perennial proposals or WikiProject Parliamentary Procedure instead.

"WP:PROTECT" redirects here. You may be looking for Wikipedia:Child protection or Wikipedia:WikiProject Protected areas instead.

Enforcement policies
Administrators Banning policy Blocking policy Protection policy

	Fully protected
	Template-protected
	Semi-protected
	Create protected
	Move protected
	Upload protected
	Pending changes protected (level 1)
	Pending changes protected (level 2)
	Extended confirmed protection
	Protected by Office

Wikipedia is built around the principle that anyone can edit it, and it therefore aims to have as many of its pages as possible open for public editing so that anyone can add material and correct errors. However, in some particular circumstances, because of a specifically identified likelihood of damage resulting if editing is left open, some individual pages may need to be subject to technical restrictions (often only temporary but sometimes indefinitely) on who is permitted to modify them. The placing of such restrictions on pages is called protection.

Protection can only be applied to or removed from pages by Wikipedia's administrators, although any user may request protection. Protection can be indefinite or expire after a specified time period.

The most commonly encountered types of protection are full protection, which means that a page can be modified only by administrators, and semi-protection, which means that a page can be modified only by users who are logged in and whose accounts have been confirmed (any account is automatically confirmed if it is at least 4 days old and has made at least 10 edits). Other forms of protection are detailed below. Protected pages are normally marked with a small padlock symbol in the top corner; different color padlocks represent different protection types, as shown in the images at the right. {{pp-protected}} is usually placed on protected pages to display the padlock.

Positioning the mouse pointer over the padlock symbol produces an informational tooltip which says "This article is protected." If {{Pp-protected}}'s reason parameter is specified, the tooltip also says why the page is protected. If the expiry parameter is specified, the tooltip says for what duration the page is protected.

This policy explains in detail the protection types and procedures for page protection and unprotection and the reasons for which protection should and should not be applied.

Overview of types of protection

The following technical options are available to administrators for protecting pages:

• Full protection prevents editing by everyone except administrators. Fully protected media files cannot be overwritten by new uploads.
• Semi-protection prevents editing by unregistered contributors and contributors with accounts that are not confirmed.
• Creation protection prevents a page (normally a previously deleted one) from being recreated (also known as "salting").
• Move protection protects the page solely from renaming/moving.
• Upload protection prevents new versions of a file from being uploaded except by administrators, but it does not prevent editing the file's description page.
• Pending-changes protection level 1 means edits by unregistered and new contributors are not visible to readers who are not logged in, until the edits are approved by a reviewer or administrator.
• Pending-changes protection level 2 means edits by unregistered, new contributors, and autoconfirmed contributors are not visible to readers who are not logged in, until the edits are approved by a reviewer or administrator. Note: There is no consensus for use of Pending changes level 2 on the English Wikipedia per the 2014 RfC on PC2.
• Extended confirmed protection, also known as 30/500 protection prevents editing by users without 30 days tenure and 500 edits on the English Wikipedia. It is applied to combat any form of disruption where semi-protection has proven to be ineffective. It should not be applied as a protection level of first resort. Its use is logged at the Administrators' noticeboard.

Any type of protection (with the exception of cascading protection) may be requested at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. Changes to a fully protected page should be proposed on the corresponding talk page, and carried out by an administrator if they are uncontroversial or if there is consensus for them.

Except in the case of office actions (see below), Arbitration Committee remedies, or pages in the MediaWiki namespace (see below), administrators may unprotect a page if the reason for its protection no longer applies, a reasonable period has elapsed, and there is no consensus that continued protection is necessary. Editors desiring the unprotection of a page should, in the first instance, ask the administrator who applied the protection unless the administrator is inactive or no longer an administrator; thereafter, requests may be made at Requests for unprotection. Note that such requests will normally be declined if the protecting administrator is active and was not consulted first. A log of protections and unprotections is available at Special:Log/protect.

Interaction of Wikipedia user groups and page protection levels

	Unregistered or Newly registered	Auto-confirmed, Confirmed	Extended confirmed	Pending changes reviewer	Admin	Appropriate for
No protection	Normal editing (can edit; changes go live immediately) "Go live" means the changes become visible to readers who are not logged in to Wikipedia. In all cases throughout this table, changes are immediately visible to readers who are logged in.					The vast majority of pages
Pending changes level 1 protection	can edit; changes go live after reviewer acceptance	Normal editing. (If there are previous pending changes, no changes will go live until the pending changes have been reviewed.)		Normal editing; can accept pending changes*		Infrequently edited articles with high levels of vandalism or BLP violations from unregistered and new users
Semi-protection	cannot edit	Normal editing				Articles with high levels of vandalism or edit warring from unregistered and new users; some highly visible templates & modules
Extended confirmed prot.**	cannot edit		Normal editing			Specific topic areas authorized by Arbcom; pages subject to persistent disruption that semi-protection has failed to stop
Pending changes level 2 protection	can edit; changes go live after reviewer acceptance			Normal editing; can accept pending changes*		No consensus for use on the English Wikipedia (per WP:PCRFC)
Pending changes L2 w/ Semi-prot.	cannot edit	can edit; changes go live after reviewer acceptance
Template prot.	cannot edit (unless Template editor, in which case Normal editing)				Normal editing	High-risk templates & modules
Full protection	cannot edit					Articles with persistent vandalism or edit warring from (auto)confirmed accounts; critical templates & modules
* When an Administrator or Pending Changes Reviewer edits an article that has pending changes awaiting review, they are prompted to review the pending changes before saving their edit. ** This row assumes that a Pending changes reviewer is also Extended confirmed. (A Pending changes reviewer needs separate Extended confirmed rights to edit through Extended confirmed protection; in practice nearly all Pending changes reviewers will have that additional right.)

Types of protection

Full protection

A fully protected page can be edited or moved only by administrators. The protection may be for a specified time or may be indefinite.

Modifications to a fully protected page can be proposed on its talk page (or at another appropriate forum) for discussion. Administrators can make changes to the protected article reflecting consensus. Placing the {{Edit fully-protected}} template on the talk page will draw the attention of administrators for implementing uncontroversial changes.

Content disputes

On pages that are experiencing edit warring, temporary full protection can force the parties to discuss their edits on the talk page, where they can reach consensus. Isolated incidents of edit warring, and persistent edit warring by particular users, may be better addressed by blocking, so as not to prevent normal editing of the page by others.

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, copyright violations, or defamation of living persons. 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 (see above).

Administrators should not protect or unprotect a page to further their own positions in content disputes.

Vandalism

Applying page protection in a pre-emptive measure is contrary to the open nature of Wikipedia and is generally not allowed if applied for these reasons. However, brief periods of an appropriate and reasonable protection level are allowed in situations where blatant vandalism or disruption is occurring and at a level of frequency that requires its use in order to stop it. The duration of the protection should be set as short as possible, and the protection level should be set to the lowest restriction needed in order to stop the disruption but allow editors outside the problematic range to edit the page without restriction.

"History only" review

If a deleted page is going through 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 {{TempUndelete}} or a similar notice, and fully protect the page to prevent further editing. The previous contents of the page are then accessible to everyone via the page history.

Protected generic image names

Generic image names such as File:map.jpg or File:Photo.jpg are fully protected to prevent new versions being uploaded.

Permanent protection

Some areas of Wikipedia are permanently protected by the MediaWiki software. The MediaWiki namespace, which defines parts of the site interface, is fully protected; it is impossible for administrators to remove this protection. User CSS and JavaScript pages, such as User:Example/monobook.css and User:Example/cologneblue.js, are automatically fully protected. Only accounts that are associated with these pages or administrators are able to edit them. This protection applies to any user subpage created with a ".css" or ".js" extension, whether an equivalent MediaWiki skin exists or not. Administrators may modify these pages, for example, to remove a user script that has been used in an inappropriate way.

In addition to hard-coded protection, the following are usually permanently protected:

• Pages that are very visible, such as the Main Page or File:Wiki.png.
• Pages that should not be modified for copyright or legal reasons, such as the general disclaimer or the local copy of the site copyright license.
• Pages that are very frequently transcluded, such as {{tl}} or {{ambox}}, to prevent vandalism or denial of service attacks. This includes images or templates used in other highly visible or frequently transcluded pages. See Wikipedia:High-risk templates for more information.

Template protection

Main page: Wikipedia:Template editor

A template-protected page can be edited only by administrators or users in the Template editors group. This protection level should be used almost exclusively on high-risk templates and modules. In cases where pages in other namespaces become transcluded to a very high degree, this protection level is also valid.

This is a protection level that replaces full protection on pages that are merely protected due to high transclusion rates, rather than content disputes. It should be used on templates whose risk factor would have otherwise warranted full protection. It should not be used on less risky templates on the grounds that the template editor user right exists – the existence of the right should not result in more templates becoming uneditable for the general editing community.

Editors may request edits to a template-protected page by proposing them on its talk page, using the {{Edit template-protected}} template if necessary to gain attention.

Semi-protection

See also: Wikipedia:Rough guide to semi-protection

Semi-protection prevents edits from unregistered users (IP addresses), as well as edits from any account that is not autoconfirmed (is at least four days old and has at least ten edits to Wikipedia) or confirmed. This level of protection is useful when there is a significant amount of disruption or vandalism from new or unregistered users, or to prevent sock puppets of blocked or banned users from editing, especially when it occurs on biographies of living persons who have had a recent high level of media interest. An alternative to semi-protection is pending changes, which is sometimes favoured when an article is being vandalised regularly, but otherwise receives a low amount of editing.

Such users can request edits to a semi-protected page by proposing them on its talk page, using the {{Edit semi-protected}} template if necessary to gain attention. If the page in question and its talk page are both protected please make your edit request at Wikipedia:Request for edit instead. New users may also request the confirmed user right by visiting Requests for permissions.

Guidance for administrators

Administrators may apply indefinite semi-protection to pages that are subject to heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy (such as biographies of living persons, 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 to privilege registered users over unregistered users in (valid) content disputes.

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

• Subject to significant but temporary vandalism or disruption (for example, due to media attention) when blocking individual users is not a feasible option
• Subject to edit-warring where all parties involved are unregistered or new editors (i.e. in cases in which full protection would otherwise be applied). This does not apply when autoconfirmed users are involved.
• Subject to vandalism or edit-warring where unregistered editors are engaging in IP hopping by using different computers, obtaining new addresses by using dynamic IP allocation, or other address-changing schemes such as IP address spoofing
• Article discussion pages, when they have been subject to persistent disruption. Such protection should be used sparingly because it prevents unregistered and newly registered users from participating in discussions. A page and its talk page should not normally be protected at the same time. If a page and its talk page are both protected, the talk page should direct affected editors to Wikipedia:Request for edit, to ensure that no editor is entirely prevented from contributing.
• Protection should be used sparingly on the talk pages of blocked users, including IP addresses. Instead the user should be reblocked with talk page editing disallowed. When required, or when reblocking without talk page editing allowed is unsuccessful, protection should be implemented for only a brief period, and not exceeding the duration of the block.

Today's featured article may be semi-protected just like any other article. But since this article is subject to sudden spurts of vandalism during certain times of day, administrators should semi-protect it for brief periods in most instances. For the former guideline, see Wikipedia:Main Page featured article protection.

Creation protection

Administrators can prevent the creation of a page through the protection interface. This is useful for bad articles that have been deleted but repeatedly recreated. Such protection is case-sensitive. There are several levels of creation protection that can be applied to pages, identical to the levels for edit protection. A list of protected titles may be found at Special:Protectedtitles (see also historical lists).

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

Pages that have been creation-protected are sometimes referred to as "salted". Contributors wishing to re-create a salted title with more appropriate content should either contact an administrator (preferably the protecting administrator), file a request at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection, or use the deletion review process. In any case, it is generally preferable to have prepared a draft version of the intended article prior to filing a request.

In December 2016 consensus was found to allow the usage of extended confirmed protection in create protecting articles. This change leaves semi-protection, extended confirmed protection, and full protection as available levels for salting - administrators should choose the appropriate one at their discretion.

Move protection

Move protected pages, or more technically, fully 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 Administrators' noticeboard and articles selected as "Today's featured article" on the main page.

Fully edit-protected pages are also implicitly move-protected.

As with full edit protection, protection because of edit warring should not be considered an endorsement of the current name. When move protection is applied during a requested move discussion, the page should be protected at the location it was at when the move request was started.

All files are implicitly move-protected; only file movers and administrators can move files.

Upload protection

Upload protected files, or more technically, fully upload-protected files, cannot be replaced with new versions except by an administrator. Upload protection does not protect file pages from editing. Upload protection may be applied by an administrator to:

• Files subject to persistent upload vandalism.
• Files subject to a dispute between editors.
• Files that should not be replaced, such as images used in the interface or transcluded to the main page.
• Files with common or generic names.

As with full edit protection, administrators should avoid favoring one file version over another, and protection should not be considered an endorsement of the current file version. An obvious exception to this rule is when files are protected due to upload vandalism.

Pending changes protection

Further information: Wikipedia:Pending changes

Pending changes protection is a tool used to suppress vandalism and certain other persistent problems, while allowing all users to continue to submit edits. Pending changes protection can be used as an alternative to semi-protection to allow unregistered and new users to edit pages, while keeping the edits hidden to most readers until they are accepted by a reviewer.

When a page under pending changes protection level 1 or 2 is edited by an unregistered (IP addresses) editor or a new user, the edit is not directly visible to the majority of Wikipedia readers, until it is reviewed and accepted by an editor with the pending changes reviewer right.

When a page under pending changes protection level 1 is edited by an autoconfirmed user, the edit will be immediately visible to Wikipedia readers; however, when editing a page under pending changes protection level 2 or if there are already unreviewed changes pending, the edit will not be directly visible until it is reviewed and accepted by an editor with the pending changes reviewer right.

Pending changes are visible in the page history, where they are marked as pending review. The latest accepted revision is displayed to the general public. Logged-in users see the latest revision of the page, with all changes applied. When editors who are not reviewers make changes to an article with unreviewed pending changes, their edits are also marked as pending and are not visible to most readers.

Both logged-in users and anonymous users who click the "edit this page" tab may edit the latest version as usual. If there are pending changes awaiting review, there will be a dropdown box next to the article title, pointing to the pending changes. For more details, see Help:Pending changes.

Reviewing of pending changes should be resolved within reasonable time limits.

Following a community discussion, the level 2 ('review') pending changes option was retired from the English Wikipedia in January 2017.

When to apply pending changes protection

Pending changes may be used to protect articles against:

• persistent vandalism
• violations of the biographies of living persons policy
• copyright violations

Pending changes protection should not be used as a preemptive measure against violations that have not yet occurred. Like semi-protection, PC protection should never be used in genuine content disputes, where there is a risk of placing a particular group of editors (unregistered users) at a disadvantage. Pending changes protection should not be used on articles with a very high edit rate, even if they meet the aforementioned criteria. Instead semi-protection should be considered.

In addition, administrators may apply temporary pending changes protection on pages that are subject to significant but temporary vandalism or disruption (for example, due to media attention) when blocking individual users is not a feasible option. As with other forms of protection, the time frame of the protection should be proportional to the problem. Indefinite PC protection should only be used in cases of severe long-term disruption.

Only what is known as "Pending changes level 1" should be used, which is labelled "Require review for revisions from new and unregistered users". Pending changes level 2, or "Require review for revisions from everyone except Reviewers", should not be used at this time per WP:PCRFC.

Removal of pending changes protection can be requested of any administrator, or at requests for unprotection.

The reviewing process is described in detail at Reviewing pending changes.

Extended confirmed protection

Extended confirmed protection, also known as 30/500 protection, prevents edits from all IP editors and any registered user with less than 30 days' tenure or fewer than 500 edits. Pages with this level of protection can be edited only by editors with the extended confirmed user access level, granted automatically to editors with the requisite tenure and number of edits.

In cases where semi-protection has proven to be ineffective, administrators may use extended confirmed protection to combat disruption (such as vandalism, abusive sockpuppetry, edit wars, etc.) on any topic. Extended confirmed protection should not be used as a preemptive measure against disruption that has not yet occurred, nor should it be used to privilege extended confirmed users over unregistered users in valid content disputes on articles not covered by Arbitration Committee 30/500 rulings. Extended confirmed protection may be used at administrator discretion when creation protecting a page.

30/500 protection formerly (until August 12, 2016) only applied in topic areas determined by the Arbitration Committee, which authorized its use on articles reasonably construed as belonging to the Arab-Israeli conflict; as an arbitration enforcement tool by motion or remedy; or as a result of community consensus. As of September 23, 2016, a bot posts a notification in a subsection of AN when this protection level is used.

Office actions

As outlined at Wikipedia:Office actions, pages may be protected by Wikimedia Foundation staff in response to issues such as copyright or libel. Such actions override community consensus. Administrators should not edit or unprotect such pages without permission from Wikimedia Foundation staff. A list of pages under the scrutiny of the Wikimedia Foundation can be found here.

Cascading protection

"WP:CASCADE" redirects here. You may be also looking for Wikipedia:Cascading style sheets.

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 English Wikipedia. Files stored on Commons will not be protected by cascading protection, and need to be temporarily uploaded to English Wikipedia or protected at Commons. 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 semi-protected pages as it represents a security flaw. See Bugzilla:8796 for more information.
• Is not instantaneous; it may be several hours before it takes effect. See Bugzilla:18483 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. See the "Protection of templates" section below for alternatives.

The list of cascading-protected pages can be found at Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items. Requests to add or remove cascading-protection on a page should be made at Wikipedia talk:Cascade-protected items as an edit request.

Deprecated protection

Superprotect

Superprotect was a level of protection, allowing editing by only Wikimedia Foundation employees who are in the Staff global group. It was implemented on August 10, 2014 and used the same day to override community consensus regarding the use of the Media Viewer on the German Wikipedia's primary site javascript, common.js. It was never used on the English Wikipedia. On November 5, 2015, the WMF decided to remove superprotect from all Wikimedia wikis.

Cascading semiprotection

Cascading semiprotection was formerly possible, but it was disabled in 2007 after users noticed that non-administrators could protect any page by transcluding it onto the page to which cascading semiprotection had been applied by an administrator.

Protection by namespace

Talk pages

Modifications to a protected page can be proposed on its talk page (or at another appropriate forum) for discussion. Administrators can make changes to the protected article reflecting consensus. Placing the {{Edit protected}} template on the talk page will draw the attention of administrators for implementing uncontroversial changes.

Talk pages are not usually protected, and are only semi-protected for a limited duration in the most severe cases of vandalism.

User talk pages

User talk pages are rarely protected, and are semi-protected for short durations only in the most severe cases of vandalism from IP users. Users whose talk pages are semi-protected should have an unprotected user talk subpage linked conspicuously from their main talk page to allow good faith comments from non-autoconfirmed users.

A user's request to have his or her own talk page protected is not a sufficient rationale to protect the page.

Blocked users

Blocked users' user talk pages should not ordinarily be protected, as this interferes with the user's ability to contest their block through the normal process. It also prevents others from being able to use the talk page to communicate with the blocked editor.

In extreme cases of abuse by the blocked user, such as abuse of the {{unblock}} template, re-blocking the user without talk page access should be preferred over protection. If the user has been indefinitely blocked from editing the talk page, they should be informed of off-wiki ways to appeal their block, such as the UTRS tool interface or as a last recourse, the Arbitration Committee.

When required, protection should be implemented for only a brief period, not exceeding the duration of the block.

Confirmed socks of registered users should be dealt with in accordance with Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry; their pages are not normally protected.

User pages

User pages and subpages can be protected upon a simple request from the user, as long as a need exists—pages in userspace should not be automatically or pre-emptively protected. Requests for protection specifically at uncommon levels (such as template protection) may be granted if the user has expressed a genuine and realistic need.

Root user pages (for example, the page User:Example, and not User:Example/subpage or User talk:Example) are automatically protected from creation or editing by unconfirmed and IP users. Exceptions to this include when an unconfirmed or IP user attempts to edit their own user page. IP and unconfirmed editors are also unable to create edit user pages that do not belong to a registered user. All of this is handled by a filter.

When a filter is insufficient to stop user page vandalism, a user may choose to create a ".css" subpage (ex. User:Example/Userpage.css), copy all the contents of their user page onto the subpage, transclude the subpage by putting {{User:Example/Userpage.css}} on their user page, and then ask an administrator to fully protect their user page. Because pages in user space that end in ".js" and ".css" are only editable by the user the user space belongs to and administrators, this will protect your user page from further vandalism.

Deceased users

See also: Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians/Guidelines

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

Protection of templates

See also: Wikipedia:High-risk templates and Wikipedia:Template documentation

Highly visible templates, which are used on an extremely large number of pages or substituted with great frequency, are often semi- or template-protected based on the degree of visibility, type of use, content, etc.

Protected templates should normally have the {{documentation}} template. It loads the unprotected /doc page, so that non-admins and IP-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 protected. Only manually add {{pp-template}} to protected templates that don't use {{documentation}} (mostly the flag templates).

Cascading protection should generally not be applied directly to templates, as it will not protect transclusions inside <includeonly> tags or transclusions that depend on template parameters, but will protect the template's documentation subpage. Instead, consider any of the following:

• If the set of subtemplates is static (even if large), protect them using normal protection mechanisms.
• If the set of subtemplates is unbounded, use MediaWiki:Titleblacklist to protect all subtemplates using a particular naming format (as is done for editnotice templates and subtemplates of Template:TFA title).

Note: All editnotice templates (except those in userspace) are already protected via MediaWiki:Titleblacklist (which can, however, be overridden by template editors).

Sandboxes

See also: Wikipedia:About the Sandbox

Sandboxes should not ordinarily be protected since their purpose is to let new users test and experiment with wiki syntax. Most sandboxes are automatically cleaned every 12 hours, although they are frequently overwritten by other testing users. The Wikipedia:Sandbox is cleaned every hour. Those who use sandboxes for malicious purposes, or to violate policies such as no personal attacks, civility, or copyrights, should instead be warned and/or blocked.

Available templates

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

On redirect pages, use the {{Redirect category shell}} template, which automatically categorizes by protection level, below the redirect line. A protection template may also be added below the redirect line, but it will only serve to categorize the page, as it will not be visible on the page, and it will have to be manually removed when protection is removed.

See also

• MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext
• Special:Protectedpages
• Special:Protectedtitles
• Wikipedia:Edit lock
• Wikipedia:List of indefinitely protected pages
• Wikipedia:Requests for page protection
• Wikipedia:Rough guide to semi-protection
• Wikipedia:Make protection requests sparingly, an essay
• m:Protected pages considered harmful
• m:The Wrong Version
• Category:Wikipedia fully-protected edit requests
• Wikipedia:Protection policy/Padlocks