Scratchpad:Cascade-protected items

<br />This page is currently under construction.<br />As such, it is not yet ready for action.

 Important: This page is not intended for most templates or files. Items transcluded here are considered ultra-high-use and are often critical to the Scratchpad interface or used on many articles or other pages. Occasionally, individual templates will be part of a very closely-related family of templates, all of which should probably be cascade-protected to avoid problems; even if an individual template in such a family isn’t widely used, it should probably still be protected for the same reason. Only key and critical templates are added to this page: Others should be individually protected without cascading. Finally, mainspace pages should never be added to this page.

This page is used to protect:

1. High-risk templates that should always be protected, using cascading protection.
   • On occasion, accidental unprotection or transclusion of unprotected templates into protected templates have led to severe disruption.
2. High-risk files transcluded by them or used in the interface.

Do not delete or unprotect items because they are listed at this page! Don't do it, especially if a file has a backup copy on Commons. This page is meant to be an extra protection, to protect against silly mistakes, such as admins deleting or unprotecting high-risk templates and files. This cascade page is not meant to be the only protection. Items should generally only be removed from this page as a result of a deletion discussion closed as delete, in the course of complete deprecation in favor of a newer item, or because there is consensus to drop the item's protection to template protection. They should not be removed just because they are no longer widely used.

If this page causes any kind of problem, please ask on the talk page or speak to an(other) admin.

As a last note, due to the nature of cascading protection, it is technically impossible to allow users (even autoconfirmed users or bots) to directly edit the lead, see also section, categories or interwiki links of this page; therefore, all changes must be requested on the talk page using {{editprotected}}. For the same reason, cascading protection should not, generally, be applied to individual templates, since it protects their /doc subpages as well.

Template:INDEX

Escape templates

Often used in system messages and templates with Parser Functions.

Citation templates

Used in almost every article

Meta stuff

High-risk templates that serve as "roots" for more specific templates.

Interface templates

Templates that are used in the interface. That is, templates that have been designed to be used in the MediaWiki namespace.

Cascade protected images

The images listed here are protected even if they are accidentally deleted. Thus no-one can upload a bad image during that time. This also protects the images after they have been restored, since admins sometimes forget to re-protect the images after they have restored them.

Admins sometimes delete protected images by accident, or because they think we don't need them since they exist on Commons. But images are usually locally uploaded and protected here at the English Wikipedia since they are used in an interface message or in some widely used template. Thus these images are high-use and high-risk.

See also

• Full list of cascade-protected pages
• Scratchpad:Protection policy#Cascade protection
• Scratchpad:High-risk templates
• Category:Protected templates
• {{High-risk}}
  • {{High-use}}
• {{Used in system}}