Help:Protected pages

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Administrators can protect and unprotect pages. Protection of a page or image means that a non-admin cannot modify it.

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.

Uses

• Protecting highly vandalised pages, such as the Main Page on large wikis.
• Maintaining the integrity of the site's logo and favicon.
• Maintaining the integrity of key copyright and license pages.
• 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/monobook.css or user/cologneblue.js. Only the accounts associated with these pages (and admins) are able to edit them.

Rules

1. Do not make the common mistake of protecting pages unnecessarily. For example, do not protect a page simply because it is the Main Page.
2. Do not edit a temporarily protected page except to add a notice explaining the page is protected.
3. Do not protect a page you are involved in an edit dispute over. Admin powers are not editor privileges - admins should only act as servants to the user community at large.
4. Avoid favouring one version of the article over another, unless one version is vandalism.
5. Temporarily protected pages should not be left protected for very long.
6. Talk pages and user talk pages are not protected except in extreme circumstances.
7. The protection of a page on any particular version is not meant to express support for that version and requests should therefore not be made that the protected version be reverted to a different one.