Wikipedia:High-risk templates

infrequent

Guideline

Following Wikipedia:Protection policy, page protection may be permanently 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 semiprotected, 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, that 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

There are two reasons high-risk templates are protected: vandalism and server load.

Vandalism — The risk of vandalism to a template transcluded thousands of times is obvious. 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 of highly-used templates lowers this risk. Experience has shown that vandalism to templates is often accompanied by the use of multiple autoconfirmed accounts, and thus full protection is required to prevent abusive editing.

Server load — Whenever a template is edited, the wiki software not only updates the template, but every page that transcludes the template. For example, if template A is transcluded in 1000 articles, then editing template A effectively changes all 1000 articles (plus the template). The Mediawiki software has been written to make it impossible to mount a denial-of-service attack in this manner. This is achieved by using a job queue which holds a list of pages that need to be recompiled. The pages are slowly recompiled over time, spreading out the server load.

A side effect of the job queue is that it can take a while for changes to a template to become visible in all pages where the template is used, especially if the job queue is already long due to other templates being edited. This delay can cause confusion among users who are not familiar with the job queue system. Editors sometimes believe that the template is broken and attempt to fix it instead of waiting for the changes to work through the job queue; that only makes the job queue longer and prolongs the delay. Protection of highly-used templates helps to ensure that only editors familiar with the effects of editing templates make the changes, and reminds editors that the effect of their edits will be delayed by the job queue.

Documentation and padlock

Main page: Wikipedia:Template documentation

Semi and fully protected templates should normally have the {{documentation}} template. It loads the unprotected /doc page, so that non-admins and IP-users can edit the documentation, categories and interwiki links. It also automatically adds {{pp-template}} to protected templates, which displays a small padlock in the top right corner and categorizes the template as a protected template. Only manually add {{pp-template}} to protected templates that don't use {{documentation}} (mostly the stub and flag templates).

The bottom of protected templates should usually look like this:

<!--Last line of the template code--><noinclude>

{{documentation}}
<!-- Add categories and interwikis to the /doc subpage, not here! -->
</noinclude>

Relevant discussions

• Wikipedia talk:Protection policy/Archive 2#Template protection
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive57#Spurious obscenities

See also

• {{editprotected}} – Placed on a talk page to request an edit of the corresponding fully protected page.
• {{editsemiprotected}} – To request that other editors update a page, for users that are not logged in or are too new to edit a semi-protected page.
• Wikipedia:Requests for unprotection
• Wikipedia:List of indefinitely protected pages#High use templates – An incomplete list of templates protected per this guideline.
• Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items – A page which cascade-protects many widely-used templates and files.