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 (e.g. Draft:Owifebajotzergon, where "bajotz" is a disallowed entry). Unless otherwise stated, blacklisted titles can only be created by administrators. The blacklist uses regular expressions ("regex") to check whether a page title can be created.
Purpose[edit]
In order for articles to remain up, they 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 usually get deleted through one of various 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 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 become salted as users, especially administrators, become fed up over a seemingly unending cycle of creation and deletion. Creation of a salted page is restricted to either registered users, (auto-)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.) appeared for 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 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 create pages with any blacklisted terms; (auto-)confirmed users can only create pages 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. Untold news, Wikipedia:Untold news, Draft:List of untold news in the 1960s).