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Our protection policy defines what protection is, the circumstances under which an article might be protected, and gives editors suggestions on how to contribute to articles which are protected.
Definition
An article is said to be "under protection" when administrators restrict the kind of access other editors have to it.
The vast majority of pages on this wiki — indeed, on any wiki — are not protected in any way. Anyone, regardless of whether they have an account here, can change the content of most pages. This freedom is one of the central philosophies of wiki editing. However, there are some pages which are so fundamental to the coherent organisation of this wiki, that administrators must defend them against frivolous editing, such as spamming or vandalism. Thus, you may occasionally run into pages which have either been protected (sometimes called semi-protected ) or locked (sometimes called fully protected).
Protected articles
When an article is protected, it cannot be edited by anonymous (IP) editors and registered users who are not logged in. It also cannot be edited by extremely new editors even if they are registered.
The usual reason for placing this level of protection on a page is that an administrator has deemed it to be a page that might be vulnerable to attack by vandals. Many times, vandalism is carried out by people who think that the "anonymity" of the internet will allow them to "get away" with tearing things down. On other occasions, vandalism is the result of a thing called a bot — a robotic programme that automatically trawls sites looking for vulnerabilities. In both cases, protection — or technically but confusingly "semi-protection" — is an effective deterrent.
What protection isn't
Protection does not mean that you can't edit an article. It means only that you have to be logged in to edit the article. That said, if your account is less than a month old, you probably will not be able to edit protected pages directly.
Also, a protected article is not necessarily obviously protected. The "protected" tag (as seen to the left) is the result of using the template, {{tl|semi-protect)). It is not the result of actually protecting an article. It is possible to have articles which aren't protected showing that tag, and articles which are protected not showing it. It would be great if the MediaWiki software which powers this wiki automatically placed a visible sign on a page when an admin protected it. But it doesn't. Our admin try to make sure that each protected page has a clear sign of its protected status showing, but they're busy people prone to mistakes, just like you.
Locked articles
A locked article is one that you cannot edit. The number of locked articles on this wiki is extremely small, much smaller even than the number of protected pages. Most locked articles aren't really "articles" at all — they tend to be what are called "templates" — essentially shortcuts that allow you to use one word in the place of dozens of lines of wiki markup. The kinds of templates that get locked are ones that other templates depend on to work, or ones that have complicated code.
For instance, the template, {{YearNav}}, is a constituent part of {{Timeline}}. If {{Timeline}} is on the page 1987, for instance, {{YearNav}} tells {{Timeline}} to display the ten years surrounding 1987. Thus {{YearNav}} is locked because another template depends on it, while {{Timeline}} itself is locked because it's a fairly sophisticated piece of coding.
In addition to locking "code pages", we also sometimes — but reasonably rarely — lock down policy pages or help pages, too. These sorts of pages tend to get rather quickly locked if vandals attack such a page repeatedly within a short span of time. After all, we want people to be able to depend upon our help pages and policy pages — like this one — being in good, readable shape.
Finally, the rarest type of locking happens when there's a edit war on a regular page. That is, two or more users might continually overwrite each other's contributions because they strongly believe the other person is wrong. In such cases we will temporarily lock a page to help both sides cool down.
In a similar vein, we also occasionally lock pages about stories that have not been released yet. You can read more about that case at our spoiler policy page.
What locking is not
Fundamentally, locking is not about an administrator trying to prevent useful editing; it's about preventing bad-faith editing. It's definitely not about an administrator using his or her power to make sure that his or her edits of an article are protected against your edits.
As with normal protection, above, locking is also not always obvious. The act of actually locking a page and flagging it with a red tag (as seen above and to the left) are two separate things. Also since most locked pages aren't normal article pages, most locked pages don't get a visible tag.
Other protection types
These forms of protection are subsets of the above levels of protection.
Creation protection
Creation protection protects a page that has either previously been deleted or has been identified as a target for vandalism or page recreation. The level of protection applied may be either semi-protection or full protection.
Move protection
This prevents a page from being moved to another name, this can be in the form of semi-protection or full protection.
Why does X page have protection on it?
Certain pages may be semi-protected or fully protected to prevent vandalism or unhelpful content being added to the page.
Pages may also be semi-protected to maintain the consistent quality of a page. This usually applies to pages that attract a high number of rumours. Semi-protection ensures that random rumours are not added without proper citation.
Full protection of pages is applied to many base-level elements of the wiki to prevent modification of aspects that are integral to the smooth running of the wiki. Full protection is also added so some articles and article titles to prevent their creation or editing (this applies usually to yet to be broadcast or released stories). Full protection may also be applied to disputed articles in order to resolve edit wars (see below).
Recently released stories
Articles relating to recently released or broadcast are routinely semi-protected in an attempt to combat random edits that flow in following the broadcast or release of a story.
Edit wars
An edit war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's contributions. In some situations the decision will be made by an admin to fully protect the article rather than blocking individual users so that the issue may be discussed with the article in a state of stasis while the discussion takes place.
Editing information on protected pages
If you wish to add information to a protected article but are prevented from doing so, you may add a request to the talk page of the article. If the information is valid, another user who is not prevented from editing the page may add the information for you. However, the information will be reviewed to be in keeping with our various policies, and therefore we cannot guarantee that all requested information will be added.