Help:Protection
 | This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
Depending on its level of protection, editing on the page has been restricted to either autoconfirmed users or administrators. We regret any inconvenience this may cause—we strive to protect pages only when absolutely necessary and to unprotect them as soon as possible. We usually only protect pages that, for whatever reason, show themselves to be particularly prone to vandalism. If you wish to experiment with editing Wikipedia, please try the Wikipedia sandbox.
For more information on who protected the page and for what reason, see:
- The talk page of the protected page
- The protection log
- The protection policy
The expiry of the period of protection is usually shown by a template that has been added to the article, independent of the actual protection mechanism. The template displays a message like "This article is currently protected from editing until October 13, 2015". The expiry time may not be displayed, and is not in general midnight UTC; it can be found in the protection log, a link to which is shown in the template message at the top of the article.
Most pages on Wikipedia are only protected temporarily, to prevent edit wars or to control vandalism. You should be able to edit the page when it is unprotected in a short while. In the meantime, please feel free to discuss the changes you want to make on the talk page of the page in question. However a few types of pages are protected indefinitely:
- The Main page and all pages and images included onto it, via cascading protection
- Pages in the MediaWiki namespace, which contain system messages and text for the user interface
- Pages which have legally defined wording, such as the general disclaimer and the licensing policy
- Templates which are transcluded on many pages, such as
{{tl}}and{{ambox}}, which would make a tempting target for denial of service attacks - Images which are tempting targets for vandalism, such as Image:Wiki.png. Some images are also restricted by the image blacklist
If you discover a page that appears to have been protected and then forgotten about, you can request to have it unprotected by posting on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard. If a page has only recently been protected, it may be best to wait a few days first, unless some resolution has been reached on the talk page.
If you think that a protected page needs to be changed, please discuss the change first on its talk page. If the page is only semi-protected, a logged-in user will make the change if necessary. If the page is fully protected, you can use the template {{editprotected}} to attract the attention of a Wikipedia administrator who can make the change if it has consensus.