Wikipedia talk:Rough guide to semi-protection

Article quality
Do editors agree or disagree that increasing article quality should justify increasing levels of protection? Just to reiterate my points on the protection policy talk page:
 * High quality articles being vandalized does more damage to the quality of Wikipedia than having poor articles vandalized
 * The higher the quality an article is, the less likely a given edit will improve it
 * High quality articles will not require much editing anyway, so the negative effects should be minimal. In contrast, protecting a start class article or stub may prevent unregistered or newbie users from improving the article.
 * Top articles like FAs have enough to deal with in terms of edit creep (take a look at the number of delisted FAs) without the added burden of vandalism.
 * New editors can always start off on smaller articles to find their feet
 * Giving higher priority for protection serves as motivation for editors to improve an article

This doesn't mean that FAs should always be protected, or that stubs should never be protected, but it is something to weigh up along with other factors, when considering whether to protect (or request protection of) an article. Richard001 11:32, 5 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I see the logic behind it and where your coming from, but it would not be right at least at the moment in my opinion. Protecting what we define as good articles is a slippery slope because it does several things, for example:


 * * It assumes that some articles are so good that any or most changes will be bad, but all articles, even featured articles aren't perfect and are in a constant state of updating and refining - this is a core principle of what wikipedia is.
 * * It limits editing of articles especially to new users, and therefore becomes a block to new editors. This is a fundamental violation of User:Jimbo's concept of wikipedia, or at least what I interpreted his views as. One of wikipedia's greatest assests is the absense of cabalism and elitism among seasoned editors, it encourages new people to join the project.
 * * As most editors begin editing as anon IP's before they sign up, to restrict pages to usernames only would limit the interest of new users, a reiteration of the above point.
 * * I think there is a flaw with the idea that New editors can always start off on smaller articles to find their feet which is that often, new editors find wikipedia and gain an interest in it by searching larger more mainstream articles, the kind of article that are likely to be protected.


 * Vandalism is an inherant problem of wikipedia, and not something that will go away with increasing levels of page protection. It seems to be widely seen that our current method of dealing with vandalism is the best; request users cease and desist, inform them of the correct policy, encourage good behaviour and when nessessary block IPs . Despite the size of wikipedia, there remain just over 1000 admins. Increasing the amount of page protection will require many many more admins, the RfA process will then become easier in order to create more admins. Then unsuitable editors will penetrate the sysop levels and gain access to the admin tools which will increase the potential for vandalism at higher levels, something we have been able to avoid due to a very tightly run process. Most vandalism only lasts for minutes on articles though some can go several days or weeks. The real risk we face in my opinion is from individuals inserting what appear to be honest facts into articles which turn out to be completely fabricated mistakes/lies. E.g. changing the date of the moon landing to 1942 or something, such things often go un-noticed by editors but make the encylopedia look unreliable in the public eye. Interesting ideas though, its good to bat these things around every once in a while and see what the school of thought on it is. WikipedianProlific(Talk) 00:27, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

These are basically just arguments against protection in general. If there is a page on a mainstream topic that is a start class, it is better sense to protect it than if it is an A-class article, as there is less to be lost in terms of quality. If you want to argue against this point, put forward an argument for protecting the start class argument over the A-class version. Richard001 01:12, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

50% maximum vandalism?
The essay currently states that 50% of edits being vandalism is the 'maximal proportion', as each vandal edit will be reverted. This is not the case. Semi-protection is often applied after a string of anonymous edits from various IP addresses and sockpuppets, particularly on articles which are not widely watchlisted. For an example see where this protection was applied. There was a flurry of vandalism in the preceding three days - there were 47 vandal edits and 23 reverts - 67% vandalism. -- zzuuzz (talk) 00:36, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * That's a good point - it can vary, and vandals often make several edits at a time to one article, which are then all reverted at once. It's also possible, though probably rarer, for a user not to revert properly but to manually remove the vandalism as they come across it, thereby creating several 'revert' edits for one vandal edit. Richard001 00:44, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Semi-Protection Needed
Yesterday,I tried to have a page semi-protected because of several repeated attempts at vandalism. This was on a page that is a biography on a living person. Yet, this morning some "bot" removed the template saying the page is NOT protected. Apparently, I didn't go about it right. How does one formally go about protecting the page? I really feel this needs to be done immediately. I am referring to the biography for the rock singer Rick Springfield...and people's attempts to vandalize that page with lies re: his personal life. Can someone help me with getting that page protected? Ladycascadia 15:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Registered editors request page protection at WP:RFPP, then an admin applies (or not) protection templates. --Lexein (talk) 20:49, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Who does it block
IIRC, semi-protection means that any account with fewer than 300 edits can't edit that page. I wanted to check if I'm really recalling correctly, but I can't find this information. Any help? Thanks. --Gronky 00:46, 21 October 2007 (UTC)


 * From PROT: Semi-protection disables editing from anonymous users and registered accounts less than four days
 * The 4 day block should be part of the description of semi-protection. I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why I could not edit a semi-protected page.  Only by a little clever luck did I think to come and look on the discussion page.  By not informing people of exactly who is blocked from editing, wiki is potentially wasting a lot of people's time.Ywaz (talk) 12:44, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

User and user talk pages
It would be helpful to have some guidance on semi-protecting user and user talk pages. -- A. B. (talk • contribs) 02:15, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

BLP issues
Now this proposal/discussion migh be worth considering in adding to this page. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 13:25, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

How to
How does one nominate an article for semi-protection? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Grace321 (talk • contribs) 19:16, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Refer to WP:RFPP. —EncMstr (talk) 15:21, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

Renominate after declined WP:RFPP, or discuss in-page?
I nominated Billie Piper per WP:RFPP for temp semi-protection here but it was declined:
 * not enough recent disruptive activity to justify protection.

So I commented
 * Since Feb 15 (a month ago), of 31 edits, 7 were reverted vandalism from IP users, or 22%. Per WP:ROUGH, this is 4 times the acceptable level (5%) of vandalism for generic articles. It is suggested there that the threshold should be lower for living persons.

Or should I just renominate with these stats included? And, more generally, how best to deal with declined protection requests? --Lexein (talk) 03:26, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Old followup: After asking about this at the IRC Help channel irc://irc.freenode.net/wikipedia-en-help another admin reviewed and processed the request, but also recommended discussion with the declining editor in future, rather than IRC. --Lexein (talk) 20:49, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

How can new users be encouraged to contribute to protected pages?
The current policy seems to block all newcomers - potentially discouraging well qualified newcomers from contributing. This has occurred once on the muscle page to someone (Parissorbonne) who claims to be in the profession (though their comment suggests their participation could have been problematic). It is now happening a second time (to me!). I discovered the solution by clicking on the lock icon after several days of 'playing' in the discussion pages. Would it help to have an additional banner at the top of protected pages indicating how to edit/apply for permission? QuietJohn (talk) 19:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


 * There are several different protection templates which some take variations. For example, I just protected List of Leverage episodes‎ and added a template (pp-dispute) which has a pretty thorough summary of what to do.  I felt this template variation is more appropriate since the article has comparatively little traffic, except presumably by fans.  If the template has the parameter small=yes, then no explanation is shown, but adds the lock icon at the upper right.  This is more appropriate, IMHO, for widely read articles where the majority of readers don't care about disputes, and very likely aren't interested in expanding the article.
 * You do bring up a good point though: perhaps a drive-by reader has some useful input relevant to a dispute, or to expand/update the article.  The current paradigm is that the burden of learning how to figure things out like editprotected is placed on editors and potential editors, not on general readers.  The last statistics I saw suggests that there are about a hundred readers for every editor, so that seems to support current practice.  —EncMstr (talk) 20:11, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Why is this article( Rough guide to semi-protection) semi-protected?
It should be complete protection as no changes really need to be made to the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MrK4 (talk • contribs) 15:57, 3 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It is general practice to protect articles only when needed due to recent activity. Ideally, all articles would have no protection.  —EncMstr (talk) 16:32, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

No prominent mention
Of how to request semi-protection! I only skimmed but I didn't see a major mention of where one goes about requesting protection for an article.--Senor Freebie (talk) 14:31, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I've wikilinked WP:RFPP in the first section. --Lexein (talk) 20:49, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * This could do with being more prominent - I wanted to quickly link to this page to answer somebody's question of "how do I protect an article?" (as it's a better introduction to the concept than WP:RFPP), but this tiny wikilink seems too opaque to be very helpful. --McGeddon (talk) 08:35, 25 October 2011 (UTC)
 * --Lexein (talk) 02:08, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Some copy editing
The intro paragraph (as of 6/23/11) says that "'Friday' was derided by many music critics and viewers, who dubbed it 'the worst song ever.'"

The grammar here is unclear. Did all the critics and viewers who derided the song also dub it "the worst song ever"? Probably not, but that is what the sentence, as written, suggests.

The ambiguity can be eliminated if, between "viewers," and "who dubbed it" one added the phrase "some of who." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.6.12.237 (talk) 01:27, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Is the problem on a high-profile, widely watchlisted page?
One of the bullet points under General Considerations is "Is the problem on a high-profile, widely watchlisted page?". What does a yes mean here - if it is high-profile it SHOULD be semiprotected because many eyes will see it and it's a vandal target, or it SHOULD NOT because there are plenty of people to keep it clean manually? -- stillnotelf   is invisible  18:42, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

5% figure
The section on Criteria for semi-protection states that "on average 5% of edits to a page are vandalism. So, 5% is the level of vandalism to be expected, and semi-protection should not be applied in this case." This needs to be clarified: 5% in what time period? Five percent of edits in a 24-hour period? A week? The total edits to the article since it was created (which would require one to examine every single edit made to the article, since vandals don't really leave edit summaries describing their edits as "vandalism")? Nightscream (talk) 02:17, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
 * That figure comes from a study by the CVU, documented here. In short, they took the total number of edits in three separate months on 100 random articles and found that 5% were vandalism. NTox · talk 02:43, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Excuse the WP:Coatracking, but I'm glad the study conclusions are wikilinked right there; I'm strongly in favor of policies, guidelines, essays, and infopages having sources for claims made. --Lexein (talk) 07:14, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh, so do I. NTox · talk 01:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

SP - often used as an excuse to close down IP users in high-profile articles
Let's make no bones about it; most registered editors, and virtually all admins, hate IP editing. As a result, nearly all the popular and high-profile articles have been closed down to such editing - often permanently. Yes, figures such as 95% or articles are not protected (or whatever the actual - high - percentage is) suggest a different situation, but this promotes a lie. The fact is, as I say, nearly all important articles are shut.

How about this one. High profile, recent, important. You'd think this would be a perfect article to encourage IPs to get on the Wiki bandwagon. But no, some jerk has SP'd it for all the wrong reasons. Nearly every article of this type only survives for a short while before it's closed down.

Where in policy does it say that an article can be closed down because "it's being edited too frequently", FFS! So c'mon guys. You know you hate IP editing, so why don't you put something like this in the policy:

"An article can be semi-protected if an admin feels that IP editing is getting in the way of registered-user editing". Or perhaps "An article can be SP'd if the majority of edits are from unregistered users". Or maybe "An article can be SP'd to preempt any type of problem caused by IP editing, especially for high profile articles". One of these should take care of it.

I'd like to hear some response here, because remember:

You can edit this page!

Really, you can! If you would like to, please feel free to do so. Make an edit – or even several! After all, that's what Wikipedia is all about! . Sorry Jimbo, some people beg to differ.

86.149.35.196 (talk) 10:15, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

What does this mean?
I don't understand what this means, under General considerations: "In addition, since higher-quality articles are bigger, there is less likelihood that the article will be edited." Why would being bigger make editing less likely? --valereee (talk) 12:54, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Editing semi-protected pages?
How many edits do I need to make to be able to edit a semi-protected page? What else am I supposed to do, if anything? — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheNamelessIndividual (talk • contribs) 00:42, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Is page protection ever extended for good faith edits?
There is a page that I monitor (Gay anthem) which is persistently edited by IPs in good faith, but with unhelpful additions. (Specifically, there is a table list, as well as several prose lists of "anthems" which IPs love to add to.) These edits aren't hard to check properly for referencing, but they do take time, and I am often the only editor to check and remove these additions. Does this sort of editing qualify for semi-protection, especially when textbook vandalism is rare? — HTGS (talk) 22:08, 25 May 2022 (UTC)


 * To belatedly answer your question, yes, page protection is sometimes extended for good faith edits when the level of disruption is sufficiently high. I don't believe there is currently enough disruption on that article to justify protecting it, but page protection is an option for persistent use of unsourced or poorly sourced changes and some other types of disruptive edits that are plausibly good faith edits. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:43, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Proposed changes
I reverted your changes especially due to which really misses the point of the text that was there. This guide is about semi-protection which only affects new accounts and IP editors. If disruption is coming from autoconfirmed and higher levels of accounts then semi-protection isn't going to help.

Looking further at your other two changes:


 * I'm open to a change around "widely watchlisted" which you . It might be more accurate to split this into a separate bullet like "Is the page watchlisted by a relatively small number of users?", but it's at best a minor factor compared to the others.
 * I think it would be fine to remove "notable" as.

Let's see if there's consensus before we change anything, though. It's best to seek consensus on a talk page before making substantive changes to policies and guidelines. Please read WP:CONLEVEL for more on this.

Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:38, 16 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Oh, okay. I was editing according to WP:BRD. 123957a (talk) 21:59, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * It's allowed, but it's generally best and encouraged to use the talk page first. It's discussed more at and . I think that goes doubly if you're not actively involved in the area (e.g., frequently making page protection requests as a user or processing them as an administrator). Daniel Quinlan (talk) 22:09, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * @Daniel Quinlan: Thanks for letting me know! 123957a (talk) 22:20, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * @Awes Khan 2603:9008:20F0:A090:E977:83D8:340:CE7D (talk) 07:45, 27 March 2024 (UTC)