Wikinews:Wikinews Bulletin/2007-1/Cascading protection system for archived articles

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 * By Daniel Bryant, June 11, 2007

A new method of archiving articles has been developed, which is estimated to cut the time and effort required by administrators when archiving articles in half. Archiving is considered to be one of the most hated jobs by administrators on Wikinews.

Archived articles protection list, by exploiting MediaWiki syntax and transclusions, in combination with cascading protection, allows administrators to quickly protect pages for archiving. By using the designated template code (, a page will be protected from editing, just as a normal full-protection made manually to each individual page would do.

This process requires administrators to add noinclude templates to articles when they are preparing to archive the set of articles. This is in addition to the normal addition, which is generally made en masse using AWB.

The process, developed by Daniel Bryant and implemented by administrator Brian New Zealand on Wikinews, has been used to the desired effect on articles from May. The cascade-protected list can be seen Archived articles protection list/May 2007.

This new process resulted in a number of changes to pages in the MediaWiki namespace, especially MediaWiki:Cascadeprotected.

The new cascading protection implementation will only be used for the non-controversial act of archiving pages. Pages protected for any other reason, as noted at the protection policy, will be done manually to each specific article.

There is discussion on Admin action alerts about this new process. Any questions or comments have been invited at Wikinews talk:Archived articles protection list.

Also this fortnight (May 28 — June 11): From the editor • Sean Heron at G8 • Weather BETA Community mirror proposal • Cascading protection • Administrators and accreditations • Featured content