Wikipedia:Protection Policy - Overview of Types of Protection

Overview of Types of Protection

The following technical options are available to administrators for protecting pages:

• Full protection prevents editing by everyone except administrators. Fully protected media files cannot be overwritten by new uploads.
• Semi-protection prevents editing by unregistered contributors and contributors with accounts that are not confirmed.
• Creation protection prevents a page (normally a previously deleted one) from being recreated (also known as "salting").
• Move protection protects the page solely from moves.
• Upload protection protects the file from reupload but does not protect the file page from editing.
• Pending-changes protection (not currently in use; see below) means edits are not visible to readers who are not logged in, until the edits are approved by a reviewer.

Any type of protection or unprotection may be requested at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. Changes to a fully protected page should be proposed on the corresponding talk page, and carried out by an administrator if they are uncontroversial or if there is consensus for them.

Except in the case of office actions (see below) or pages in the MediaWiki namespace (see below), administrators may unprotect a page if the reason for its protection no longer applies, a reasonable period has elapsed, and there is no consensus that continued protection is necessary. Contacting the administrator who originally protected the page is advised in unclear circumstances. A log of protections and unprotections is available at Special:Log/protect.