instance, the article about the current President of the United States is subject to a constant stream of vandalism. Other articles may also fall under semi-protection because they are often vandalized by school students (some articles about ele- mentary and high schools are particularly vulnerable). Some very visible page components, such as high-use templates, are also protected to prevent vandal- ism; sometimes this is done automatically through a mechanism called cascading protection in which the components that make up a fully protected page, such as the main page, are also protected. Semi-protection, therefore, compromises the purist wiki principle of anyone can edit anything, but protection has been necessary essentially because of Wik- ipedia's own prominence. Administrators are responsible for protecting pages and for reviewing the protection status of pages. You can find out more at [[Wikipedia: Protection policy]] (shortcut WP:PROT). The [[Wikipedia:List of indefinitely pro- tected pages]] (shortcut WP:PERMPROT) lists pages with long-term protection. You can discuss any case of semi-protection on the talk page of the article, which will not be protected. If you feel an article needs semi-protection--for instance, if it is attracting a few dozen incidents of vandalism a day--add a note to [[Wikipe- dia:Requests for page protection]] (shortcut WP:RFPP), and an administrator will take a look and decide what to do. Further reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page basic syntax and instructions on how to edit a page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:keyboard_shortcuts shortcuts for editing Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Minor_edit A summary of Keyboard Information about minor edits The Be Bold guideline for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:Be_bold updating pages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:Protection_policy policy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:sandbox experimenting with editing The Protection The sandbox, for syntax Wikipedia uses a special markup language for formatting pages; this syntax is variously known as wikisyntax, wiki markup, or simply wikitext. It styles wiki pages and determines how text will appear on the screen. This syntax is common to all wikis that use MediaWiki software (though it will not work on wikis that use other software). 144 | Chapter5