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 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 certain titles can be created.
Purpose
[edit]On Wikipedia, articles are required to have reliable and independent secondary sources (per notability guidelines) as well as to comply with guidelines pertaining to what Wikipedia is and is not. Otherwise, they would be deleted through one of several methods. For the most part, after an article gets deleted, the author simply moves on. There are times, however, when some editors recreated certain articles against consensus and ignored the red warning box displayed on deleted pages. Certain pages were repeatedly recreated so many times that administrators instituted creation protection ("salt") on these pages, restricting creation 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 creation protections, effectively restricts creations of multiple pages with titles containing disallowed regex term(s). As a matter of fact, blacklisted entries are case-insensitive by default, although some entries are made to be case-sensitive using the <casesensitive> tag. Administrators can create pages with any blacklisted terms; (auto-)confirmed users can only do so with any terms carrying the <autoconfirmed> tag. The <moveonly> tag prevents existing pages from being renamed to include any blacklisted terms, such as appending "on wheels" onto article titles.
The blacklist is effective in preventing certain users from recreating pages with name variations under any namespace (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 like a user's sandbox are not obvious. In fact, more salts usually push dedicated vandals toward obscure page names where they are harder to detect.