User:Anakin101/Protection levels

Levels

No protection

Creation: Registered users in main namespaces. Everyone, logged in or not, in talk namespaces.

Editing: Everyone.

Moving: Autoconfirmed users (that is, logged-in users whose account is at least 4 days old).

Semi-protection

Editing: Autoconfirmed users.

Moving: Autoconfirmed users.

Padlock: Silver

Commonly used for: Heavy vandalism by anonymous or new users.

Move-protection

Editing: Depends on whether semi-protection was also applied or not.

Moving: Administrators.

Padlock: Olive

Commonly used for: Title disputes, until agreement can be reached.

Full protection

Editing: Administrators.

Moving: Administrators.

Padlock: Gold, or brass, depending on your point of view. Commonly called gold as it makes sense that the next level up from semi-protection (silver) would be gold. However, the gold padlock looks like this:

— the padlock used for full protection is actually an ordinary (brass) one, and the padlock used for semi-protection is not silver (metal), just silver (color).

Commonly used for: More serious disputes, highly visible pages, such as the main page, or very heavily used templates.

Cascading protection option: If used, also protects all templates and pages transcluded onto a fully protected page.

Title/creation protection

Creation: Administrators.

Padlock: Sky blue.

Commonly used for: Preventing people from persistently recreating deleted articles, or from overriding Common images with local ones. Referred to as salting. Note that the protection is case-insensitive, but the logs (annoyingly) won't show the protection entry unless you enter the exact case which was protected.

See also: MediaWiki:Titleblacklist

Office actions

Editing: Administrators can edit these pages technically, but should not do so.

Moving: Administrators can move these pages technically, but should not do so.

Padlock: Black

Used for: Legal disputes. See Wikipedia:Office actions.

Interface protection

Used for: In the MediaWiki namespace, all pages are protected by default and cannot be unprotected. Use of the red padlock has also spread to some other permanently protected non-article pages.

Creation: In the MediaWiki namespace, administrators only.

Editing: Administrators.

Moving: Administrators.

Padlock: Red. The padlock is not actually used on MediaWiki pages since they are used for interface text (see Special:Allmessages), but the red padlock is associated with this type of protection.

Templates

These templates can be placed on pages to indicate graphically the level of protection. They do not actually protect pages, which must be done through the protect this page screen or WP:RPP.

Other images

See Commons:Padlock icons