This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense and the occasional exception. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.
This page in a nutshell: High-risk templates may be fully protected. Edits to such templates should be infrequent.

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[edit] Guideline

Following Wikipedia:Protection policy, page protection may be permanently applied to all templates which 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.

[edit] High-risk templates and biographies of living people

Since templates are transcluded to a set of articles, any change to a template can affect all the related articles instantly. Changes to high-risk templates should be done carefully and sometimes some discussions are needed prior to any change.

In some cases, edits to templates may violate the Wikipedia biography of living people policy (BLP) if they are done deliberately harmfully (i.e. vandalism) or unintentionally (i.e. adding contentious material). Administrators may semi-protect or fully protect a BLP-related template at their own discretion. They may fully protect templates related to high-profile BLPs, considering them thus as high-risk templates, in order to protect Wikipedia against violations of the BLP policy. Editors can then make requests to edit the template via the talk page by using the {{Editprotected}} template or requesting a template unprotection at Wikipedia:Requests for unprotection when needed. See also: Category:Wikipedia protected edit requests.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Relevant discussions

[edit] See also