User:AlphaBeta135/TitleBlacklist
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TitleBlacklist is a powerful form of creation protection (also known as "salt") in which it prevents certain users from creating or renaming pages with disallowed terms as part of their titles regardless of namespace. Unless otherwise stated, only administrators can create pages with blacklisted titles. The blacklist uses regular expressions ("regex") to check whether a page title can be created.
Purpose
[edit]On Wikipedia, articles are required to have reliable and independent secondary sources as per notability guidelines. They are also required to comply with guidelines pertaining to what Wikipedia is and is not. Otherwise, they would usually be deleted through one of several methods. For the most part, editors simply moved on when an article gets deleted. There are times, however, when a handful of editors recreated certain articles against consensus and ignoring the red warning box displayed on deleted pages.
By default, non-confirmed editors are unable to create articles; however, most of them can still create non-mainspace pages like drafts. Certain pages were repeatedly recreated so many times that administrators instituted creation protection ("salt") on these pages. Creation of such pages is restricted to either registered users, confirmed users, extended-confirmed users, or admins.
Because salted titles are case-sensitive and only affect one namespace, some users found workarounds to bypass the salt. "Fake articles" usually appear in draftspace and userspace with the purpose of recreating articles without any substantial improvements. Articles with different name variations (spelling, capitalization, etc.) were made with the same purpose. Salting every single name variations of a deleted article is impractical.
TitleBlacklist, unlike regular salts, effectively salts multiple pages with titles (and their substrings) matching one of the disallowed regex terms. Not only that, blacklisted entries are case-insensitive by default, although some entries are made to be case-sensitive using the <casesensitive> tag. Administrators can generally create pages with any blacklisted terms; (auto-)confirmed users can only do so with any terms carrying the <autoconfirmed> tag. New pages can be created using <moveonly> terms, but existing pages cannot be renamed to include these terms.
The blacklist is effective in preventing certain users from recreating pages under any namespace and pages with certain name variations (e.g. Bugatti Alex, Wikipedia:Bugatti Alex, Draft:BUGATTIALEX).
Just one caveat...
[edit]Although TitleBlacklist can salt more pages at once than a regular creation protection, the blacklist is also not perfect. Because the blacklist only addresses minor name variations, such as different namespaces and capitalization, certain workarounds still remain. Some workaround pages have an obvious association with the salted subject, while others are not obvious. In fact, more salts usually push dedicated vandals toward obscure pages, such as someone's sandbox page, where they are harder to detect.