Project:Protected titles

There are some repeatedly created, but unwanted page titles, and some commonly spammed wiki pages (external links or just nonsense text messages) on MediaWiki.org.

Spam Protection for specific titles
If you are repeatedly receiving spam on a page that doesn't otherwise exist there are two ways of blocking the page from being edited once you have deleted it.

Additional suggestion for visitors: Watch W/w/index.php, Talk:Main Page/ and other such pages on your own wikis and add any URLs added by spammers to your Spam blacklist (see SpamBlacklist extension).

Method 1: Dummy page
Create a template called and place it in the problem pages. By having some content on the page you are able to protect it from anonymous editing, which may be more user-friendly than method 2, particularly if the pages may conceivably hold content in the future.

See Wikipedia:Protected deleted pages for exemplary usage.

Method 2: Cascading protection
If you are using a version of MediaWiki with cascading protection enabled, then another method is to create a central page to administer the protection, and within that page transclude each problem page using code like this:

Enabling cascading protection for the central page will then protect all transcluded pages as well, even if they don't exist, so it saves you polluting your wiki with a lot of dummy pages that you don't need.

This is the method we have used here on MediaWiki.org.

As for all cases of cascading protection, be careful with it. Delete the unwanted page before you add it to the central page where cascading protection is enabled. Otherwise, especially if there are other templates placed on an unwanted page, and if you have thus protected other pages by accident, it might take some time to manually revert that protection.
 * Note

See Wikipedia:Protected titles for exemplary usage.