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Tardis:Protection policy: Difference between revisions
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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 [[help:bot|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. | 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 [[help:bot|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 | ====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. | 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. | ||
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===Locked articles=== | ===Locked articles=== | ||
[[file:LockedTab.png|left|25px]] | [[file:LockedTab.png|left|25px]] | ||
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 [[help:wiki markup|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, {{tl|YearNav}}, is a constituent part of {{tl|Timeline}}. If {{tl|Timeline}} is on the page [[1987]], for instance, {{tl|YearNav}} tells {{tl|Timeline}} to display the ten years surrounding 1987. Thus {{tl|YearNav}} is locked because another template depends on it, while {{tl|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 [[help:editing|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 [[tardis:spoiler policy|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== | ==Other protection types== | ||
