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This page documents an official policy on Scratchpad. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that everyone should follow. Except for minor edits, please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy. |
Salting pages occurs when Administrators use the the mediawiki software’s page protection system to prevent the re-creation of deleted pages by “locking” those page names. Most often, this occurs when a page not permitted on Scratchpad has been repeatedly re-created and it is desired that such re-creation cease. A list of protected titles may be found at Special:ProtectedTitles.
Pages that have been create-protected are said to have been “salted”.
Important: Pre-emptive restrictions on new article titles are instituted through the title blacklist system, or through the use of abuse filters, which allow for more flexible protection with support for substrings and regular expressions.
Administrators: How to “salt” a page
In order to create-protect a particular page, that page must not exist. It either has to have never been created, or has to have been deleted.
Regarding just-deleted pages, the server cache clears immediately for the main/article namespace (i.e., ns:0). However, it can take longer for page caches in other namespaces to clear, sometimes as much as 48 hours.
To determine if the cache has cleared and the page can be create-protected, create is the only protect option that should be available. If options such as edit, move, upload, etc., are available, then the cache has yet to clear. In such cases, diarize the page to be create-protected, and try again the next day.
Important: Create-protection is case sensitive.
Users/Editors: Un-salting a page
Contributors wishing to re-create a salted title with more appropriate content should contact an Administrator, preferably the one who deleted the page, and/or protected it.
Alternatively, you may request that the page be unprotected at Scratchpad:Requests for page protection (shortcut → SP:RFPP). The first available Administrator will process your request.