Wikipedia:Rough guide to extended confirmed protection
Explanatory essay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Articles under extended confirmed protection (ECP) can be edited only by extended-confirmed accounts – accounts that have been registered for at least 30 days and have made at least 500 edits, or have been manually granted extended-confirmed rights by an administrator, usually because they are legitimate alternative accounts of users who already have those rights. Extended confirmed (30/500) protection is therefore a stronger form of protection than semi-protection (rough guide).
 | This is an explanatory essay about the protection policy's extended-confirmed protection section. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
The official policy related to applying extended confirmed protection is located at Wikipedia:Protection policy § Extended confirmed protection. This rough guide describes how that policy is currently being applied by administrators.
General considerations
Generally, articles should first be placed under semi-protection to see if semi-protection in combination with appropriate blocks can give sufficient protection to obviate the need for extended confirmed protection. If semi-protection proves too weak even in combination with blocks that are appropriate, extended confirmed protection can be deployed. In the rare case of a long history of disruptive editing of an unprotected article by multiple autoconfirmed accounts (usually due to sockpuppetry), administrators can bypass semi-protection and apply extended confirmed protection immediately.
Technical limitations
As of December 2024, Wikipedia does not have the ability to enforce ECP restrictions when those restrictions apply only to certain sections of articles, as they do for example, when ECR is applied to specific topic areas. In these cases, enforcement may be done by EC editors.
As arbitration enforcement
Deployment of extended confirmed protection may be mandated or permitted as a remedy in Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) decisions. Any protection made as arbitration enforcement is automatically logged at Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log/Protections.[1]
The following topics are placed under the extended-confirmed restriction (ECR) by ArbCom:
- the Arab–Israeli conflict
- ECP is applied by default for articles strictly within the topic area
- the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45)[2]
- Indian military history[3]
- caste-related topics in South Asia[4]
- Zak Smith[5]
The community has further authorized extended-confirmed restriction for the following topics:
- politics, ethnic relations, and conflicts involving Armenia, Azerbaijan, or both
- the Russo-Ukrainian War
- Kurds and Kurdistan
In addition, a consensus of admins at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard (AE) may extend ECR to subtopics of WP:ARBIPA (India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) if such a sanction is necessary to prevent disruption; such extensions must be of a limited duration, not to exceed one year.[3]
Administrators may apply indefinite extended confirmed protection at any time to any page covered by ECR at their discretion, whether or not there has been disruptive editing on the page.[6] There is a general consensus that administrators should neither apply ECP to pages with only a tenuous link to the contentious topic nor seek out articles in the topic area to protect preemptively. Many administrators will only apply ECP in circumstances where there have been editing disputes involving accounts that fail the 30/500 rule.[6][7] As an exception, articles strictly within the Arab–Israeli conflict topic area should have ECP applied by default.
Pages within contentious topics that are not covered by ECR are not automatically eligible for ECP. However, ECP has been applied as a page restriction when necessary to prevent disruption within contentious topics.[8]
Discussion of an administrator's decision to apply ECP
As with other protection decisions, if a decision to apply ECP needs to be discussed, this should first be raised on the protecting administrator's talk page.
While the RfC that allowed ECP to be used outside topics specified by ArbCom mentions a notification on the administrator's noticeboard, most admins consider this requirement to be met by the bot that updates the table on WP:AN and so expect discussions to be held in the usual place.