Scratchpad:High-risk templates

Following Protection policy, page protection may be indefinitely applied to all templates and template redirects that have been identified by the community as being of high risk to Wikipedia. If fully protected, so that they can only be edited by administrators, these templates should be changed only after consensus for the change has been established on the template's talk page. If semi-protected, templates may be edited by any established user, but users should ensure there is consensus for their edits and avoid edit wars on templates.

The most common reasons a template is considered high-risk are:
 * The template is used in a permanently highly visible location, and it isn't cascade protected.
 * The template is transcluded into a very large number of pages.
 * The template is substituted extremely frequently on an ongoing basis (for example, templates used to warn users about inappropriate editing).

There are no fixed criteria, and no fixed number of transclusions, that are used to decide whether a template is high-risk. Each template is considered separately. If a template relates to a biography of a living person that would strengthen any arguments in favor of (preemptive) protection of the template.

Rationale
The risk of vandalism is increased for a template that is transcluded many times or is shown on high-visibility pages. The fact that numerous readers would see an edit to these templates provides an incentive to vandalize them and also magnifies the damage done by such an act.

Although this kind of vandalism is reverted very quickly (often within one minute), it might be seen by thousands of viewers before it is removed; protection lowers this risk. Because experience has shown that vandalism to templates is often performed from multiple autoconfirmed accounts, full protection may be required to prevent abusive editing.