Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

At the moment, when an anonymous or newly-registered user tries to edit a protected page - regardless of the protection level - they are presented with the message "This page is either protected or semi-protected" (followed by a list of things which may or may not apply depending which is the case). That the software itself cannot explain to users which of these seems to me rather odd, and certainly needlessly confusing for users who are struggling to understand how MediaWiki works anyway.

Recently the message for blocked users was separated into one for directly blocked and one for autoblocked users, but while that would work here, I understand from other bug reports there are some issues with doing that.

How about supplying a parameter to [[MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext]] representing the (edit) protection level - at the moment, either "editprotected" or "sysop" - which would allow the message to be coerced, via parser functions, to display different things for each situation? This would have the advantage that it would still work should additional protection levels be introduced in future.

Supplying additional parameters containing the reason for protection and the protection expiry time would also be useful - an almost identical set-up is already in place for [[MediaWiki:Blockedtext]], where both the block reason and block expiry time are available as parameters - but looking at an existing bug report requesting the former of these, there appear to be some issues with that too.