Wikidata:Protection policy
 | This page documents a Wikidata policy. It is a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. All changes made to it (except for minor edits such as fixing typos) should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the project chat. |
This page contains Wikidata's protection policy.
Admins will protect pages for short amounts of time to prevent vandalism or spam which repeatedly occurs on them. This action should generally be done after a pattern of vandalism or spam can already be seen in the page's history, but for high-use pages (such as the main page and the community portal) it can be done without such history.
A list of protected pages can be found at Special:ProtectedPages. Page protection can be requested at the administrators' noticeboard.
Protection types
There are three kinds of protection that can be applied to existing pages.
- Semi-protection (symbolized by
) allows only autoconfirmed users/confirmed users to edit the page. - Full protection (symbolized by
or 
) only allows administrators to edit the page. - Move protection (symbolized by
) does not affect who can edit pages, but does prevent anyone except for administrators from moving affected pages to new locations. Most high traffic pages are move protected. Move protection cannot be applied to items or properties. - Create-protection (symbolized by
, for both full and semi-create protection) can be applied to deleted or nonexistent pages. Like move protection, however, it cannot be applied to deleted items or properties.
- Full create protection prevents the page from being created except by administrators.
- Semi-create protection also allows autoconfirmed and confirmed users to create.
In extremely rare circumstances the Wikimedia Foundation will protect a page as an office action (symbolized by 
). Office actions only occur as the result of a formal complaint made off-wiki, are always publicly declared as office actions, and are only done by members of the Wikimedia Foundation staff or its Board of Trustees. Office actions cannot be undone without the express permission of the Wikimedia Foundation. Administrators who do so without permission risk being summarily desysopped.
Edit warring
Pages may be protected at administrator discretion in the event of edit warring. Administrators must not use their privileges to make any edits to the page (unless the administrator's changes are clearly uncontroversial or supported by consensus); doing so may lead to blocks, or in repeated instances, a discussion about their continued administrator privileges.
Highly used items
All items used by 500 Wikimedia pages or more should be semi-protected. Semi-protection that is only justified by usage should be lifted once the item falls below the threshold. The criteria of Wikidata administrators about usage or visibility on Wikimedia projects may also be enough to semi-protect other items.[1]
References
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