Extension:ProtectText

A quote is a simplified notation of a fragment of text or data that has to be treated as a protected section. The reason can be diverse, ranging from a simple statement of a person to a measure taken by a researcher in a laboratory. The extension makes it possible to protect such fragments.

Defaults can be changed in  to enable configuration of each value, and then further enabled or disabled as necessary. Note that enabling some of the features can add to much protection and will freeze the article, while to little protection can open up for vandalisme..

Fundamental operation is to protect large blocks of text, paragraphs of text and small fragments. Large blocks are protected through &lt;protect&gt;, paragraphs through an initial paragraph sign ( § ), and small text fragments through enclosing the text in a special wiki markup ( {§ and §} ).

Protected text will be collected, and if the previous revision differs from the present, then the user must have sufficient rights to be able to save the page. This is either given by a necessary user rights level when all previous versions of the page are written by one and only one user, or by an alternate and higher level if there are multiple contributors. Normally the user can write on the page without interference in his or her own user space. This makes it possible to write a research-oriented work, and then lock down portions of the work. If a page contains works by multiple contributors, then it will be necessary to let someone with additional and higher righs do the actual protection.

Normally there will be two such levels. One is the basic level which allows use of the protection markup when no other are writing on the page. Because this has to be done in the users own space the basic protection levels should be associated with rights to move a page. The other level is the advanced level where the user must cooperate with other users when protecting the page. This will be similar to ordinary protection and should follow the same user rights.

There can be a maximum amouth of protected text inside an article, and when there are more protected text than this limit the text will not be locked down. The same happens when a too large section is protected. When this happens the unprotected text either has to be extended, the protected text has to be reduced or an user with sufficient rights has to save the article. The requesting user can save the article although, as long as he is the only contributor, but the text will not be protected.

''Note that it is not easy to implement a overrule in this case to both let the user be able to save, the admin to protect and the article to stay at the correct protection level. Probably the user has to remove parts of the markup that enforce additional text to be protected.''

Usage
Protecting large sections of text can be easilly done by the tag &lt;protect&gt;. This can span several subparts of the text, even parts in different sections and inside paragraphs.

&lt;protect&gt;This is a tekst with explisitt block-level protection. Such text can run over several lines or even paragraphs.&lt;/protect&gt;

Most of the time it is better to protect small sentences instead for large text blocks. § This is a protected sentence. This is not a protected sentence.

Very often it is possible to protect only small distinct parts of the text. Within this sentence there is a {§protected fragment§}.

Policy
It is of great importance that there is a clear policy about what to protect and when. If to much of the page is protected then it will become stale and die. If to little is protected it will open up for vandalism that can be very difficult to rectify. Normally a date should be protected, but a description of what did happen on that day should not be protected as rewrites would be clearly visible. Likewise a quote of a person can be, and probably should be, protected. An explanation of what this means should not be protected as this might change over time.