Plants vs. Zombies Wiki:Protection policy

This is the protection policy of Plants vs. Zombies Wiki.

Protection types
There are five different types of protections.

Semi-protection
Semi-protection prevents new users with less than four days of account age and ten edits (non-autoconfirmed users) from editing. This is the most common form of protection and normally enough to stop vandals from vandalizing an article.

Full protection
Full protection effectively restricts a page from being edited by anyone but content moderators and administrators. This level of protection is only used in high-risk pages such as the Plants vs. Zombies Wiki namespace and widely-used templates, or in very specific cases where preventing edits from autoconfirmed users is required.

Move-protection
This prevents users from moving a page. Used in situations where a page is being constantly renamed.

Creation protection
Creation protection prevents users from creating a specified page. This is useful in cases such as to stop users from continuously recreating deleted pages.

Cascading protection
Cascading protection protects a page and any pages linked in it. This is normally not used due to its nature.

When to apply protections
To help keep the wiki a collaborative place for users, protections should only be done when they're needed. Here are some basic criteria for protection.

Semi-protection
This level of protection should be enforced when: An ideal expiration date for this level of protection is 3-7 days, unless if the page has been semi-protected once; 1-3 months for the second protection, 6-12 months for the third protection, and infinite for the fourth. Note that these are only the ideal length of protection.
 * The page is under constant vandalism.
 * A new user continues to bring back low-quality edits on a page despite multiple revision undoes.

Full protection
Since this level of protection effectively restricts all users but content moderators and admins from editing a page, this should only be applied when: When applying this to articles, never set the length to infinite as it will effectively prevent users from being able to edit them until the protection is removed manually.
 * The page is under constant vandalism by established users formerly masquerading as normal users ("sockpuppets")
 * The page is part of the Plants vs. Zombies Wiki namespace.
 * The page is a critical template that's used in articles (e.g. infoboxes).
 * The page is subject to constant low-quality edits by multiple users.

If there is a fully protected mainspace article with infinite expiry time, be sure to contact a content mod, admin, or bureaucrat. Usually this happens due to an error such as forgetting to include expiry time when the page was being protected.

Move-protection
This protection should be applied when:
 * The page is being constantly moved despite repeated warnings to stop it.
 * The page is being vandalized by renaming it to nonsense or inappropriate titles.

Creation protection
This should only be applied when:
 * A page is being constantly renamed to the target page name despite multiple attempts to stop it.
 * Official PopCap/EA employees demand us to not create a specific page, usually because it might spoil the upcoming content.
 * That specific page name is subject to abuse by spammers.

Cascading protection
Due to its nature, content moderators and admins should never use this protection to prevent issues with pages refusing to be edited by members.