How to protect a page from editing on a MediaWiki website

Wikis are built around the principle at "anyone can edit them", but there are times where it becomes necessary to stop a certain group of people from being technically able to edit a particular page.

MediaWiki fortunately has an option for administrators of a wiki to protect, or "lock", a page from editing from certain editors. This is often used in cases of vandalism, or to stop an edit war between editors. It is often used on templates that are used on thousands of pages, in order to prevent site-wide disruption caused by template vandalism.

Step 1. Have the user rights needed to protect a page
You normally require administrator privileges in order to protect a page. If you don't have that flag, you can ask a local bureaucrat to appoint you as one, or you should probably just ask another administrator to do it for you.

Step 2. Open the page you wish to protect
Pretty self-explanatory.

Step 3. Open the page protection interface
This can usually be found in a drop-down menu located next to the "View History". If you are on Wikia, the button is located in the drop-down menu next to the Edit button. It is always labelled "Protect".

Step 4. Set your protection settings
There are four types of protection:


 * Edit: Prevents the contents of the page from being edited by a certain group of users
 * Move: Prevents the page from being renamed by a certain group of users
 * Upload: (Appears on file pages only) Prevents new versions of a file from being uploaded by a certain group of users
 * Create: (Appears on pages that do not exist or have been deleted) Prevents the page from being created by a certain group of users

And there are three levels of page protection:


 * Allow all users: No protection settings
 * Block new and unregistered users: "Semi-protection". Only autoconfirmed users can perform the action (usually have made over 10 edits and are over four days old)
 * Administrators only: Only administrators can perform the action

You can also set an expiry time for each protection type. The protection will be removed automatically when the timer expires.

Once you're done, provide a reason for protecting the page - this is shown in the protection logs, as well as to users that attempt to perform the action but are blocked by the protection.

Step 5. Click on "Confirm"
The page will be protected immediately. An empty edit will show up in the page history, and a new log entry will be recorded in the protection log.