Administrators can protect and unprotect pages, including ones that do not exist. Protection of a page or image usually means that a non-admin cannot modify it.
The majority of pages on all Wikia remain unprotected and, thus, publicly editable. Pages may be temporarily or permanently protected for several reasons.
Semi-protection[]
The following are usually semi-protected, meaning the page is protected only from anonymous users (IP addresses) but can be edited by registered users:
- Protecting pages from excessive and persistent vandalism.
- Preventing repeatedly created vandal or spam pages from creation.
- Enforcing a "cool down" period to stop a counter-productive edit war, upon request or admin discretion, depending on gravity of edit conflict.
- Maintaining the integrity of certain pages.
- High-profile or high-traffic pages or categories that are frequently visited yet also highly vandalized (such as articles on books and main characters).
- Pages that deal with a topic or material that is yet to be released.
Full protection[]
Full protection is when only administrators (sysops) can move or edit a page. Most pages should be not protected, meaning that default settings apply to both moving and editing.
- MediaWiki pages (automatic)
- Documents (e.g. policy pages)
- Site logo, background image, and favicons
- For legal reasons, such as maintaining the integrity of key copyright and license pages that should not be changed.
- Protecting the structure of highly-used templates (such as the infoboxes) to avoid unwanted mass changes from being made throughout the wiki, which is the instantaneous result when when such templates are edited, hence several major templates are protected.
- Personal .css and .js pages (like user/monobook.css or user/cologneblue.js) are only editable by the accounts associated with these pages, as well as the admins. (For more information on using these pages, see Help:User style.)
- Pages that deal with recently-released material; only temporary.