Help:Protection

This page is protected from editing to deal with vandalism


When editing Grand Theft Wiki, you may come across a page which does not grant you permission to edit in any way. The chances are the page has been protected by a member of staff.

Any page on Grand Theft Wiki can be protected from editing, as long as there is a valid reason.

When a page is protected, only the staff ranks of administrators or above have the permission to edit it; they also have the power of protecting and removing protection on pages. You as a registered user (or any other Special and MediaWiki namespaces) can however request for a page to be protected, but since there is no current cleanup template specifically for page protection, you need to request on the talk page of the respected page or ask a member of staff to do it for you. They will then decide if protection is really necessary. Only do this if you are absolutely sure your requested page is suitable for protection. Having too many pages protected makes it harder for people to edit, defeating the purpose of Grand Theft Wiki.

Protection Lengths

The time period of protection can vary depending on the situation. Temporary protection is often used to quickly prevent consistent vandalism although permanent protection can also do this when needed. Permanent protection is more often used however to protect high profile and important pages (such as the Main Page) from being vandalised or regularly edited without permission of staff.

Protection Templates


There are various ways of displaying protection. Although using templates are recommended it is unnecessary, as attempting to edit a protected page will result in the message below regardless:


On-page template

One method of staff showing that pages are protected is to use {{protect|small=yes}}, which displays a small padlock in the top right corner of the page, like the one on the right hand corner of this section. It is not an invasive box, and it still links to this explanation if you click on it.

Talk page template

Adding a protection template to the top of the talk page is useful and is encouraged. Using this will explain the reasons behind the protection to any users who may be confused or even upset. The most commonly used template is {{protect}}, shown below:



Temporary protections

For pages temporarily protected, staff using the notation of: {{Template:Protect|expiry={{#time:F j, Y|+2 months}}}}, can specify a date that is (for example) exactly two months from the current time. When that date has passed, the page will be moved into Category:Expired Protected, so that a staff member can remove protection from that page, available for editing again by Registered Users. An example of this template is below: