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If you have cruised through Wikipedia's articles, pages, images, or other areas where the content was tied up in arbitration, vandalism sprees, edit wars, or generally considered to be controversial odds are good that you've encountered one of the various multicolored padlocks located on the upper right hand side of a Wikipedia page. For most established users, these padlocks serve merely as a checkpoint to help screen out problematic editors, but for unregistered or very new users these padlocks can be a very frustrating sight on the article circuit because they indicate that the page in question has been protected.
Page protection can be applied to any page here on Wikipedia, but it is most often associated with problematic articles and certain high-profile Wikipedia pages. While anyone can request in good faith that a page be protected only those who possess administrative rights can officially protect or unprotect a page here on Wikipedia. To better understand page protection and issues surrounding it this essay will serve as a basic walkthrough of the levels of protection, where to request a page be protected or unprotected, and touch briefly on the role of administrators in the process. It does not, however, replace the site-wide guidance found at WP:Protection policy, which should be deferred to in all instances.
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