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This page documents a Scratchpad guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the talk page. |
Following Scratchpad’s protection policy, page protection may be indefinitely applied to all templates and template redirects that have been identified by the community, and/or its Administrators, as being of high risk to Scratchpad. 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 is not cascade protected;
- The template is transcluded into a very large number of pages; and/or
- 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. For instance: 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 eventually reverted, 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.
References
This page uses Creative Commons licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).