Bulbapedia:Protection

This article is a proposed guideline for Bulbapedia. Please discuss the proposed guideline and suggest possible changes on the article's talk page.

As part of the MediaWiki software, pages on Bulbapedia can be protected from editing by users below a certain rank. Some page protections apply to non-autoconfirmed users; other page protections apply to anyone who is not staff. Protection can be done on a limited-duration or indefinite/infinite timeframe, depending on the reason and rationale. Below are guidelines both for users and administrators for when a page is to be protected.

Reasons for protection

Pages may be protected for multiple reasons, described in detail below.

Edit warring or vandalism

Pages currently subject to an edit war or regular vandalism may be protected to stop the edit warring, or to prevent vandalism from outside actors/groups.

Creation

A page that is protected from creation may be done because of TKTKTK

Policy

Policy pages are protected; only staff can modify wiki policy. For discussion of policy or to propose changes, please use the talk page.

The Main Page

The Main Page is protected so that all users have a positive experience when seeing the wiki, and no vandalism or advertisements can be inserted.

Templates

High-use templates may be protected to prevent an edit to the template breaking many pages across Bulbapedia.

Impact on users

Protected pages cannot be edited by normal users; however, the source wikicode of the page can be viewed. This allows users to learn about template design and other wikicode features. If you are unsure why a page is protected, please contact a admin.

If there is something on a protected page that should be added or changed, leave a message on the talk page. If nobody has replied to the message or made the change after several days, ask an active admin on their talk page.

There are two levels of protection from editing of a page: pages can be protected from moving or editing by users who are not autoconfirmed, as well as from all who are not on Bulbapedia's staff. The protection from autoconfirmed users is mainly to keep users who have not been around long from editing a page and inserting information which will have to be cleaned up; usually this is not used due to the relatively short time between registration and becoming autoconfirmed.

Protection restricted for administrators only is used most often on Bulbapedia. Protection of a page already created may be due to speculation added to or vandalism of the page, and should not be, in most cases, set to indefinite.

Administrator guidelines

Pages protected with an expiration time are preferred in most instances, such as the case of edit warring or vandalism, though indefinite protection is often afforded to the high-use templates that appear on many of our pages, as well as to pages which should only be edited by administrators, such as pages on policy. Administrators can protect for any of the default times, or for arbitrary amounts of time; best judgement should be used when setting a protection duration.

Pages can be separately protected from moving as well as from editing. All Pokémon species pages should be protected from moving, while protection for editing them should expire one year or less from the point of protection.

Always explain why the page has been protected in the protection log. In some cases, this may not be especially clear and it is important that those unable to edit the page know why they have been locked out.