Wikipedia:Main Page featured article protection

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.

It has been suggested many times in the past that the featured article should thus be protected or semi-protected. Protection of the page is generally prohibited. Administrators are advised to use extreme discretion when deciding whether to semi-protect the page. They should notify the community when they chose to do so. Circumstances under which semi-protection are appropriate are given below.

Rationale

There are several reasons for this policy.

• Almost without exception, featured articles are improved by their time on the main page (some of them greatly improved). Check out these before-and-after diffs from September, 2005: [1][2][3]. Protecting the featured articles means that these pages may not be improved.
• A featured article is supposed to "exemplify our very best work, representing Wikipedia's unique qualities on the Internet". This includes being editable by anyone. Visitors often tend to look at our most visible articles, and having those articles editable helps attract new users to the project.
• Vandalism (especially to highly visible articles like the main page featured article) is cleaned up very quickly, often in only a matter of seconds, helped by automated bots such as AntiVandalBot.
• Although the more visible featured article of the day attracts more vandals than other articles, it also attracts more curious and good faith editors. Semi-protection should be avoided as a lot of vandalism on the day's featured article is reverted by other anonymous or recently-registered users (e.g. [4]),
• This is codified in the page protection policy: When a page is particularly high profile, either because it is linked off the main page, or because it has recently received a prominent link from offsite, it will often become a target for vandalism. It is best not to protect pages in this case. Instead, consider adding them to your watchlist, and reverting vandalism yourself. - Wikipedia:Protection policy
• The featured article receives many page views from non-editing readers as well. It is damaging to Wikipedia to encourage new readers to visit a page that displays vulgar or offensive vandalism.

Protection

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

Semi-Protection

Semi-protection prevents all unregistered or recently registered users from editing a page. The main page featured article should also almost never be semi-protected. However, it is recognised that there are some extreme circumstances in which semi-protection can be introduced for a limited amount of time. This could occur when, for example, 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.

Semi-protection can thus be introduced for a limited amount of time, though it is preferable to try other methods of dealing with vandalism first, such as blocking problematic accounts and IPs.

Notification

Should an administrator deem that protection or semi-protection of the Main Page featured article is necessary, a notice should be placed at the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard and the page's talk page as to the reason and rationale behind the decision to protect or semi-protect, and whether there are any recommended steps for the unprotection of the page.

Move Protection

To qualify for featured article status, the day's featured article will be at a stable and agreed-upon title. Therefore, in the event of page move vandalism, it is acceptable to protect the article from being moved. For housekeeping and process reasons, this protection should be lifted at the end of an article's stay on the front page.

Other front page articles

These are covered under the semi-protection policy. Although they can be semi-protected, admins should generally be more cautious in applying protection to these pages. To qualify for semi-protection, articles linked via the front page should be experiencing a higher frequency of vandalism than other articles.

Note that none of this applies to the main page itself, which is always protected.

See Also

• Wikipedia:Today's featured article