This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:MPFAP WP:NOPRO WP:TFAP

This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia's Main Page featured article should not be fully protected; and should only be semi-protected for short periods if there is an extreme level of vandalism.

Wikipedia's Main Page featured article is one of the most visible and heavily edited on the site. For this reason, it receives a lot of vandal edits from unregistered users visiting Wikipedia. Consequently, it is and has been suggested many times that the featured article should be semi-protected. Full protection of the page is generally prohibited. Administrators only semi-protect the page as a response to extreme levels of vandalism.^[1] The length of protection is as short as the situation reasonably permits. Possible circumstances under which an administrator might consider semi-protection appropriate are given below.

Contents 1 Current practice 1.1 Semi-protection 1.2 Protection 1.3 Templates 1.4 Move protection 2 Main page 3 See also 4 Notes

[edit] Current practice

[edit] Semi-protection

Semi-protection prevents all unregistered or recently registered users from editing a page. The Main Page featured article is rarely semi-protected. However, there are some extreme circumstances in which semi-protection is appropriate. Pages which are already indefinitely semi-protected because of vandalism are generally left protected while on the Main Page. For other articles, semi-protection can be introduced for a limited amount of time under certain circumstances, for example—when a range of dynamic IP addresses are being used to vandalise the featured article page in quick succession; where personal information or potentially distressing content is being repeatedly placed onto the article; or where a few minutes of protection are needed to remove harmful vandalism from a page.

Admins may prefer to try other methods of dealing with vandalism first, such as blocking problematic accounts and IPs.

[edit] Protection

Full protection prevents anyone without administrative powers from editing an article. This almost never occurs on the day's featured article, and is only used in rare situations where blocking or semi-protection is ineffective.

[edit] Templates

Templates included in the Main Page FA are sometimes vandalized, and it is more difficult to find the source of this kind of vandalism quickly. It is also less likely that casual readers would need to modify the templates. Admins semi/full-protect the templates as needed.

[edit] Move protection

To qualify for featured article status, the day's featured article will be at a stable and agreed-upon title. Therefore, admins protect the article from being moved, before it is posted on the Main Page. For housekeeping and process reasons, this protection is lifted at the end of an article's stay on the front page.

[edit] Main page

These guidelines do not apply to the Main Page itself, which is always protected "as a result of repeated vandalism of the Main Page and [because it] keeps our welcome mat clean."^[2]

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Today's featured article
• Wikipedia:For and Against TFA protection, an essay on the subject.

[edit] Notes