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 three 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: Protecting a nonexisting page (preferred)
As Bug 2919 has been fixed in December 2007 for MediaWiki 1.12alpha, we use this method since then here; /list was recently deleted because of these changes.

MediaWiki offers native protection of nonexistent pages now, and this is applied in the same manner as ordinary protection (of existing pages).

See also Special:Protectedtitles.

Method 2: Dummy page
This is the easiest method for older MediaWiki installations (before MediaWiki 1.12):

Create a template called or so, and place it in the problem pages. By having some content on the pages you are able to protect them from editing, which may be more user-friendly than method 3, particularly if the pages may conceivably hold content in the future.

See Wikipedia:Protected deleted pages for exemplary usage.

Method 3: Cascading protection
If you are using a version of MediaWiki with cascading protection enabled (since MediaWiki 1.10), 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 in 2007.

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 also Wikipedia:Protected titles.