Wikiquote talk:Protection policy

Revision needed
The current policy was drafted 2005 and we agree there are several needs to revise (see the archived discussion), including
 * To integrate rules on semi-protection
 * To describe protection with expiry, and set rules, if necessary
 * To describe cascade protection
 * To add a note about Protected titles

Also at the call for endorsement, the change of formatting was discussed. There would be several ways to list protected pages, including:
 * Manually maintained list (current one)
 * Using categories (note: we haven't used category for sorting protected pages)
 * Category only
 * With DynamicPageList
 * Special:Protectedpages

Recently I've begun to feel our current way become a pain even gradually. Special:Protectedpages is still not under any structure, but became more helpful with the latest update (you can use several filters). Though it is not helpful to find a particular page is protected or not (no search feature - it is available on their protection log though), give no ability to sort pages by expiry term, and not alphabetically sorted, it allows us to generate lists of protected page, and maintenance-free.

Categories allows us to get an alphabetically sorted list, but it stills need to manually maintained. And we cannot get the complete list from this way due to "protected titles" unless we don't regard it as page in a rigid sense. And we can sort temporal ones from permanent ones using categories in a proper way (we need to create some new templates and categories though).

So as for sorting, I propose to shift to technical sorting, while we may prefer to keep some of significant pages on this list. We will then lose the distinction of protections due to editwars and ones due to vandalism, but it could be given on the log and templates. In details,
 * 1) We stop to add temporally protected pages to the Protected page and utilize Special:Protectedpages.
 * 2) We create categories for (semi)protected pages. Protected may be altered to have variable "expiry". Categories are useful for us to cleanup after protection is expired, while we can expect anyone can remove it, if possible. I have no strong idea if we need to separate protection permanent from temporal for now. Wikipedia seemed to try to separate them (cf. w:Category:Protected) but it doesn't seem to work well (category:temporally protected was empty).

Thought? --Aphaia 07:55, 6 May 2007 (UTC)


 * A bit haste perhaps, I rewrote the note on procedure and remove "you need to list the page here". We only keep the list of protected pages for backward compatibility. Please give a look to the current version.
 * Categories for protection pages are not yet created. Since we have only very few protected pages in main namespace, we haven't to decide very early, I hope. --Aphaia 08:25, 11 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Um, we have no procedure for unprotection ... --Aphaia 08:33, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposal: Renaming
I propose hereby to rename this policy (draft) "protection policy" as like Wikipedia. In the early stage it was aimed to have a full list of protected pages and has been for long months, but now we have no complete list here, and it wouldn't be practical to continue maintaining it (see also the section above).

Also there is another inconvenience. There are now a new list of protected pages in a special way: Protected titles. Protected page (oh and it is not gramatically correct either ...) and protected titles are somehow confusable names in my impression. On the other hand "Protected policy" and "... title" are not so much confusable.

I would propose therefore to change the name of this document to Protection policy. It may accord other sysop task related policyes, Deletion policy and Blocking policy, too. --Aphaia 01:38, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Support, I think I have suggested the same thing myself somewhere earlier. If not, then I still support it. :)  Cbrown1023  talk  02:39, 8 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Moved. Hopefully not too early ...--Aphaia 08:33, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Requesting edits to protected page
Recently, an anon user created Editprotected to get a sysop's attention about a protected page (in this case, MediaWiki:Anonnotice. I've nominated that template for deletion, but I think that the situation it was created for does need to be addressed by this policy. Right now, I see that the draft covers requesting protection, as well as requesting unprotection, but nothing about requesting a change to a protected page.

This situation could arise in a number of ways; one is requesting an edit to a page that will always be protected, like a MediaWiki: page or a high-risk template. Another is a case where a page was temporarily protected but the protected version contains something that needs an immediate edit (a copyright violation or libel would be the likely urgent cases).

The Wikipedia approach to this is w:Template:Editprotected, which I think it what the aforementioned anon editor copied. That template uses a category to maintain a list of all requested edits. I don't think that's the approach that we should take, however. Categories need to be constantly polled for sysops to become aware of changes, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect this, especially for several categories. (CAT:CSD leaps to mind as one current instance of this.) I would rather have a separate page, which can be added to a watchlist, on which editors would request edits to protected pages. (This would not exclude the possibility of also using a template and category, but just makes a page the primary resource instead of a category.) —LrdChaos (talk) 13:46, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry for late late reply. I am worry we still lack a procedure and system for request for unprotection. (Hopefully not not). If you think WQ:AN is no place for this purpose, and the combination of Template:Editprotected & CAT:PER/Category:Wikiquote protected edit requests is no best idea, go for it. --Aphaia 06:09, 23 September 2008 (UTC)