Wikinews:Protection policy

Pages and images can be protected by administrators to stop them from being edited or moved. A page can either be semi-protected to prevent editors that are not logged in or whose accounts have been registered for less than four days from editing it; or fully protected, so that only administrators can edit the page. Where possible, pages are protected for as short a time as possible, as protected pages are considered harmful.

To request the protection of a page, go to Admin action alerts.

Why pages are protected
Permanent protection is used for:
 * Protecting extremely high visibility pages such as the Main Page from vandalism.
 * Protecting high use templates from vandalism.
 * Protecting the site's logo and key copyright and license pages
 * Protecting certain technical pages (such as the MediaWiki namespace, which contains interface messages for the wiki).
 * Archiving articles in accordance with the archiving conventions
 * Protecting legitimately deleted articles from recreation
 * Preventing pages in the MediaWiki namespace from being edited; these pages can alter how Wikinews appears to all users
 * Protecting redirects and disambiguation pages, which have little need to be edited and are a potential target for vandalism.
 * Semi-protecting newly published articles, as these articles generally should not be significantly expanded

Temporary protection is used for:
 * Enforcing a "cooldown" period to stop an "edit war"
 * Preventing vandalism
 * Protecting a page or image that is a target of persistent vandalism or disruptive edits

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.

Admin advice
This does not cover articles which are being archived, but articles which are being protected for any other reason.


 * 1) Don't edit or revert a temporarily protected page except to add a protected page notice, or add dispute tags
 * 2) Do not protect a page you are involved in a dispute over
 * 3) Add protected to the top of the talk page of the temporarily protected page and note the protection in the edit summary
 * 4) Encourage resolution between the disputing parties
 * 5) Unprotect pages as soon as possible, removing protected from the top of the page, and make mention of the removal in the edit summary.

Admins should not protect pages which they have been involved with (involvement includes making substantive edits to the page or expressing opinions about the article on the talk page). Admin powers are not editor privileges - admins should only act as servants to the user community at large. If you are an admin, and you want a page in an edit war in which you are somehow involved to be protected, you should contact another admin and ask them to protect the page for you.

In addition, admins should avoid favouring one version of the article over another, unless one version is vandalised.

In general, temporarily protected pages should not be protected for long.

There is no need to protect personal CSS and JS pages like user/monobook.css or user/cologneblue.js. Only the account associated with these pages is able to edit them.