Talk: Protection policy

Protecting pages

There is a user - Captain Mike K. Bartel - who keeps "protecting" pages. I find this extremely irritating and needless! Another user added spoiler images from "In A Mirror, Darkly", so "Captain" Mike froze all the pages of Enterprise episodes still to be aired! I am outraged by this user's behaviour and feel that this over-protecting of pages is almost as disruptive as vandalism.

For example, some of the background information on the previously mentioned page is inaccurate (the episode is directed by James L. Conway, not Marvin V. Rush). Unfortunately, that error cannot be corrected as the page is frozen. Even "In A Mirror, Darkly, Part II" (which Rush did direct) is also protected, so that information cannot be added to that page either.

It would be an entirely different case if only the first episode in the two-parter was frozen, but to protect all of the following episodes in Season 4 is particularly disruptive. I strongly believe that any user who is given the ability and the right to protect pages should be responsible enough not to abuse that right. --Defiant | Talk 07:52, 11 Apr 2005 (EDT)

I don't think that this is a case of "over-protecting". We have a clear spoiler policy that keeps getting violated - in fact, I think that even the information presented on those pages right now might be too much information. These six protected pages most probably are the last episodes of Enterprise, and I really don't want to be spoiled here. I'm sure Mike (or another Administrator) will unprotect these pages immediately after the episode aired. -- Cid Highwind 08:01, 11 Apr 2005 (EDT)

Thanks Cid -- My first instinct was to delete the pages. I just protected the pages because they do contain some valuable information archivists have worked on.

I think it was a responsible use of protection, but if users continue to have a problem with the content already in those pages, the next step is deletion. I have to point out that this is clear qualification for speedy deletion, as DarkHorizon demonstrated with the images, so if I chose to do that it would be a responsible use of my ability to delete pages, not an abuse.

I was just trying to consider the contributions of Archivists who had already worked on them. I have to emphasize this was not an abuse of my administrator rights, but an abuse on the spoiler policy, that I was correcting. -- Captain Mike K. Bartel^talk

I concur. There are fans who would like to read up on background information, but do not want to read the entire story line of an episode yet. Protecting pages is preferable over deletion as well as over not having these pages protected, since MA policy concerning spoilers is often violated. Ottens 11:22, 11 Apr 2005 (EDT)

I agree - protect pages rather than delete them. I also find it more acceptable now that the information can be changed or added on the talk pages for the episodes. Sorry if it seems like my arguments are personal, against Captain Bartel in particular (who was very helpful with things like the ranks of the Nazi officers in "Storm Front"). --Defiant | Talk 12:19, 11 Apr 2005 (EDT)

Move protections?

Okay, this is just a suggestion... I'm not saying this should happen, I'm just laying it out there for ya'll to discuss. As you may know, we've had trouble with vandals moving pages to inappropriate names (such as our "Yada yada yada On Wheels!" vandal). However, I was looking at the protect stub for one of these pages, and I noticed we have the capability to protect pages from being moved while still permitting them to be edited. So, here's what I propose: we protect all the main character, series, movie, and episode articles from being moved. Think about it: what would they need to be moved to? Jean-Luc Picard will always be Jean-Luc Picard; Star Trek: Voyager will always be Star Trek: Voyager. So why not prevent those pages from being moved, and then us having to move them back when they are moved? This makes sense, doesn't it? Again, it's just a suggestion... --From Andoria with Love 18:08, 21 Dec 2005 (UTC)

I would support this move if the situation became so bad that it was absolutely necessary, but I'd really rather not. It's not that it would look bad (99% of people wouldn't notice once it was in place) or that it's illogical (it makes perfect sense), but much like the Wikicities policy that people should ideally leave their front page unprotected unless vandalism becomes too bad, I think it's the idea. We shouldn't need to do this, and I don't think we will since it only appears to be one person. If we encourage them by doing this, they'll look for something more creatively destructive. So we should do this only as a last resort. --Vedek Dukat ^{Talk | Duty Roster} 21:20, 21 Dec 2005 (UTC)

This will be an adequate precaution. Although, to "protect" about 100 articles of 15K (still counting) won't help much for real vandalism. I'm looking forward to MediaWiki 1.5-software upgrade. There will be a log for movements plus the ability for sysops to revert these changes quite fast. — Florian - ✍ talk 15:25, 22 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Protection

I know I am not an admin, so I probably am missing something. Anyway... :)

Why don't we protect all the help pages (e.g. policies or how to use wiki markup), because these are very commonly referenced and could be a large magnet to vandals. That way, only very experienced admins could edit them (and I don't think they require much editing).

I just had this Idea when I was viewing Recent changes and I saw that Shran protected the main help page because of a lot of vandalism. Just an idea. --Galaxy001 04:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

And a very good idea, IMO. I honestly don't know why the help pages have not been protected (I may have read something about it, but I can't remember). I assume it's to allow anyone the opportunity to make slight alterations or whatever, but any non-admin wishing to make any changes can simply request them in the help's talk page. --From Andoria with Love 16:53, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Like the suggestion that we protect pages from being moved, this idea isn't (or at least shouldn't be) necessary. Page protection should be used like the DEFCON system: the level of implementation should only be raised when there's a threat posed. Putting MA on permanent lockdown would be more like Bush's Homeland Security Advisory System - all it really accomplishes is worrying people. :) --Vedek Dukat ^{Talk | Duty Roster} 17:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I definitely agree with the Vedek here. Protecting a small subset of pages will only redirect the vandalism to those pages that are not protected in the long run. Protecting individual pages (temporarily) after they were vandalized several times seems to be the better option. -- Cid Highwind 17:55, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

You're right, of course. It was just a suggestion (not mine of course, but a suggestion nonetheless). For the record, though, I don't think it was ever suggested to put MA on lockdown, it was only suggested we protect all policy and help pages, since our current spammer seems to be more attracted to those at the moment. But I guess he'll probably quit on his own one he realizes he's wasting his time. --From Andoria with Love 06:16, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Policy rewrite 09/2007

A slightly rewritten policy can be found here: Memory Alpha:Protection policy/temp. I intend to replace the current policy page with this, if no one has any objections. There are no major changes in the policy itself, most of it is just rewritten for clarity (a "summary" section, for example), or added because of new Mediawiki functionality (the "expiry" feature). New text is marked in green, what's left out are links to the currently existing "list of protected pages" - since we have special pages for that purpose, I think that page is redundant now, especially seeing that it is not used regularly, anyway.

I'd also like to suggest not using the "protection boilerplate" any longer, as that only brings more attention to a temporarily protected page. Instead, we might want to make a talk page comment mandatory? -- Cid Highwind 15:14, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion moved to policy page in this revision. -- Cid Highwind 19:27, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Possible policy changes

Furthermore, I see the following pages/page types currently being protected in collision with current policy. A decision needs to be made in each case, whether we want to add that protection type to the policy as "allowed" or "necessary", or lift protection. Discuss in the sections below. -- Cid Highwind 16:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Admin user pages

Some admins protected their own user pages for either all edits or for anonymous edits only. -- Cid Highwind 16:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Should be allowed, but only for anonymous edits (no full protection). Also, it should then be made clear that any user can request the same protection for his user page.

By the way, any .css or .js pages in User: namespace are protected by default (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Protection policy#Full protection), and should not be protected further (if only to remove clutter from the list of protected pages). -- Cid Highwind 09:34, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

"Prominent" talk pages

Some talk pages, for example Portal talk:Main, are protected from anonymous edits. -- Cid Highwind 16:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Current policy explicitly states "no talk page protection", and I think it should stay that way. Perhaps we can talk about temporary protection of individual talk pages after a vandalism attack, but we shouldn't protect talk pages indefinitely "just because"... -- Cid Highwind 10:14, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Banned users

The user and user talk pages of some banned users are protected to avoid continued spam/vandalism by those users on their own pages. -- Cid Highwind 16:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Actually, we have two cases here: First, the user who gets banned (according to that policy), and then continues to vandalize using the only page he still has editing access to. Protecting that page from him could be allowed as a last resort (only to be used in extreme cases of vandalism/threats/copyvio, not because someone is mildly annoying). Even in these cases, a temporary protection of up to one month should suffice.

Second, there are the imposter accounts. I think it would be OK to protect those pages indefinitely, but then again, maybe Wikia has a better solution for that. -- Cid Highwind 10:06, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Empty pages

In some case, redirect pages are protected to avoid content being placed there. This also includes the cascading protection of Memory Alpha:Deleted pages, which prevents pages placed there from being created at all. -- Cid Highwind 16:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

High-use templates

Some templates that are used on many pages are protected from being edited, to avoid breaking too many pages at once. -- Cid Highwind 16:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I protected most of these templates myself, and I still think it's a good idea to do so. However, that protection has been circumvented more than once, sometimes breaking the templates in question, so it's obviously not consensus to have a "discuss-first" policy in place here (http://memory-alpha.org/index.php?title=Template:EpLink&action=history link). So no protection or, at most, permanent semi-protection to allow editing by anyone who wants to, seems like the way to go - unless something goes so horribly wrong one day that we can agree on more. :) -- Cid Highwind 14:36, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Boilerplates and protection expiration

I just wanted to give a reminder to administrators that while protection of pages can be set to expire, the boilerplate templates don't come off with them. You still need to remove the boilerplates yourselves. I just removed them from 4 articles, one of which hadn't been protected for nearly 4 months. These templates aren't going to mean much if they end up all over articles that aren't protected. --OuroborosCobra ^talk 10:00, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I think they don't mean much, anyway. They are just distracting for "readers" (who don't really need to be aware of the protection status of an article), and a "contributor" will be made aware of it as soon as he tries to edit the article.

The template made some sense when all we had was complete and indefinite protection, to help track currently protected pages. Now, with self-expiring protection, different protection levels, and a special page to list protected pages, it's just not as useful as it once was. Let's just stop using it, as already suggested above. -- Cid Highwind 11:11, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Agree, it's pretty much obsolete. We can probably delete it, to boot. --From Andoria with Love 23:51, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. --OuroborosCobra ^talk 00:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Memory Alpha:Protected page

I'm pretty sure this page is redundant, since we have Special:Protectedpages and the reasons given in the protection log. We actually point to the special page instead of this on on the policy page. Also, this list doesn't have even half of the total number of protected pages listed on it, and most of them are permanently protected, so it's unlikely they would ever been removed. - Archduk3 20:21, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

This dates from when the special page didn't exist. -- sulfur 20:42, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

Getting rid of this is fine with me- I guess I didn't put it together that it really wasn't being used.--31dot 20:57, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

I had completely forgotten this was even here before you used it. We could just merge this with the policy page, and list a selection of examples there, with a link to the list. - Archduk3 21:00, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

Suggested updates

Some suggested updates to this policy, as there are parts that are too restrictive in it and some parts that may not be as clear as required. I already updated it to match options in the newest software version and made the gender more neutral.

• Some pages may be protected due to continued vandalism or insertion of incorrect information. They may also be protected to preserve the integrity of Memory Alpha's content. The level and length of that protection will increase as damage done to Memory Alpha's content increases.
• Language under the "editing protected pages" section is more restrictive than it needs to be. There have been multiple occasions when a correction to a page (whether typo, libelous comment, or otherwise) or other general maintenance is required. These should be allowed. In addition, if there are non-controversial requests (or agreed-upon changes/additions), these should also be allowed, as long as they are not integral to the discussion for which the page was protected. Those changes require consensus and the reason for the protection to be removed.

More as I think of it. -- Sulfur (talk) 13:06, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I think to be clear, these precedents are based on the same principles and past practices that have already been used/have worked for the better part of the past fifteen years, and are essentially saying what those "in the loop" already know and/or understand. –Gvsualan (talk) 14:31, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Writing down policies isn't just for those in the loop, but also (and more so) those out of the loop.

The suggested changes though do make a few relaxations, notably the allowing uncontroversial agreed upon changes is rather in line with what wikipedia allows, and helps avoid everything grinding to a halt when protection is needed. AnotherOddity (talk) 15:19, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Sulfur's suggestions sound good. Taking a glance at the protected pages list, there are also things like archived chat records and Forums that could be referenced. If they're supposed to fall under 'system administration', I don't know that would be clear to everyone. - AJHalliwell (talk) 16:03, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Good catch on the archived texts. I think that there's the start of some captures of the Instagram chats that Chabon has been having lately. But including those is a good idea for sure. -- Sulfur (talk) 16:24, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I think that would easily fall under "protected to preserve the integrity of Memory Alpha's content." –Gvsualan (talk) 16:27, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

It could well do, but being explicit and clear is always preferable. I suppose we could say we have seven broad categories pages could generally be in:

• Articles
• Talk pages
• Forums
• 'Legal' pages (licensing and copyright - cannot think of a better term to summarise that)
• Templates
• Archives
• User pages

Obviously locking talk pages (ditto for forums?) is rather undesirable usually as those are for the purposes of discussion. Archives however should almost always be locked surely so they can serve their purpose, as an archive, and the 'legal' pages would be rather undesirable to be open for anyone to edit for obvious reasons. AnotherOddity (talk) 16:35, 18 February 2021 (UTC)