Wikipedia talk:High-risk templates

message: Was just editing Template:Portal talk and noticed its  not protected in any way. 308 transclusions found to page and fewer than 30 watchers. Moxy (talk) 06:00, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: 318 transclusions is not that large number. And none of them are articles. So the template is not high-risk, why do you think it should be (semi-?)protected? (If you don't think it should, why do you mention it here?) Svick (talk) 22:10, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template:Portal talk]] 

message: It would be nice:
#If not every minor template that happened to be transcluded in some obscure section of code in an actual high-risk template was treated as if it were itself a high-risk template. Unless obscure templates are used inside genuinely high risk templates  and thus expose their code to, e.g., noob vandals, there's no reason to full-protect such utility templates, as they are really at no more risk and no more highly visible than any other random template. I have no objection to their permanent semi-protection, to ward off monkeying by anons. A case in point is  (which is incidentally used by the highly-visible , if and only if it the latter is called with ), which is one of the templates I'm still working on; for one thing it needs a ns:0 test just like the xt family of templates Update: Fixed. But, someone just now willy-nilly permprotected it, so I'm locked out. (Yes, I've been around 6.5 years and am not an admin; too much politics and my tongue is apparently too sharp.)
#If admins look at template history, and if a template has a) largely or entirely been developed by one or two coders and/or b) shows signs of significant recent reworking by anyone, notify that/those editors of the intent to full-protect the template, and ask them if they need any time to complete their immediate development plans for the thing. It's like notifying people that you've tagged their article for deletion, or that they've been mentioned at WP:ANI; just a matter of courtesy and respect, and procedure appropriateness.
#If WP:HRT regulars took some time to think about how filing  requests to fix a suddenly-protected template someone is still halfway through developing, and hoping it takes less than a week Update: try two and a half weeks, lately for it to be responded to, and hoping that the responding admin even understands the code, and hoping that they consider the coder's sandboxing and testcasing to be sufficient, and hoping they don't have some bee in their bonnet about a trivial change not being "discussed for consensus", and, and, and... is a massive pain in the backside. It's getting to be so much of one I'm considering throwing up my hands and not bothering to develop templates any more except when utterly necessary (which would be a net loss for WP, frankly; I'm among the more skilled, active and need-fulfilling template coders). HRT folks might consider re-prioritizing a bit and not being so protection-happy. Not to mention ensuring that there are template-savvy admins processing the  backlog in the "Template talk:" namespace, most of which is literally being caused by HRT being over-protective. It's not helpful to fix one problem by causing another. Another way to look at it: If you lock 50 cats in your house, you have to feed them. It's lately been taking almost a  Update: almost three  for template editprotecteds to get dealt with, in my experience (maybe random bad luck, but it looks like a pattern to me).
WP:HRT "enforcement" is seeming increasingly paranoid and singleminded to me, with decreasing regard for the fallout all this protectionism is causing, and I doubt that I'm alone in this perception.  Yes, there's no policy that says that the open editing afforded to articles, which are not full-protected unless absolutely necessary, should be applied to templates, and obviously we have to be less lenient with templates, because one incident of vandalism can be seen on thousands of pages via template abuse, than we are with articles, but the pendulum has swung too far, away from the concept that this is a wiki, and people edit it, and that's the whole point. This isn't some firewalled development environment with staging servers and NDAs and security badges and 4 rounds of QA checks for every code alteration. WP is not going to fall apart if some joker goes and changes  to purple or makes it italic for the 5 minutes or 5 hours it would take before someone reverted and blocked the vandal. And it's a radically unlikely vandalism candidate. So are a large number of templates this guideline or process or project, whatever you want to call it, is full-protecting just because of their incidental connection to one of "the big ones". — SMcCandlish    Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 22:20, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stepping on developers' toes 

message: It's been the better part of a month since I raised serious issues, twice, with how this page is being [mis]interpreted to call for extremist protectionism of templates high and low, and not one person has responded in any way.  I'm inclined to interpret this as agreement with my observation that the pendulum has swung too far.  If people, admins especially (since they're the ones dealing with these templates), don't even notice that discussion, including criticism, of this guideline and its practical effects is taking place, why does it even have  on it? (Technically it's , but you get the point.) — SMcCandlish    Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 13:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It's possible that the TL;DR aspect is drowning out the message that you were trying to get across with these couple of posts.— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 21:25, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I am just passing, I didn't even know that this guideline existed. My own take on this is that sometimes there is disagreement that leads to edit wars on templates much like on ordinary pages and in cases like that then full protection is needed and probably should remain if the template is used on many pages. There are also core templates such as  which have complex structures and really should not be edited without thorough testing in a sandbox first and agreement for the change to be reached on the talk page. But for may other high usage templates, to protect them from vandalism (for which they are a prime target for malignants (rather than passing graffiti sprayers who just spray on wherever page they happen to read) it is often a better solution to use "Block new and unregistered users" as that still allows long time responsible editors to edit the template (a requirement of assume good faith). -- PBS (talk) 09:51, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Asleep at the switch? 

message: I have noticed a shocking number of templates, particularly WikiProject templates, that have been fully or semi protected due to being a high use template. Some only have a couple of hundred articles associated. This really is counter productive to the pedia. Even if someone did vandalize the page these are going to be discovered and reverted nearly instantly so there is no need to over protect these templates. Kumioko (talk) 11:20, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The above two sections say basically the same. Seems agreement to your point. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 15:40, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

text: I agree with you and SMcCandlish. — Lfdder (talk) 10:29, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

text: Ten years later, and this is still an ongoing problem. And my initial hopes for the templateeditor right have pretty much vanished. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:43, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Overboard with protection 

message: *  112.209.86.65 (talk) 05:59, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: This page is about high risk templates, not articles. I see that the GoAnimate article is currently protected. To ask for other articles to be protected, post at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:58, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Certain articles that are high-risk include... 

message: I think most sandboxes and testcases should be unprotected and not protected by the bot. They can be protected manually by an admin in case of misuse of sandbox or used in live templates. See also Template talk:Portal#Module:Portal/images/c/sandbox. Thingofme (talk) 02:16, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should */sandbox, */testcases be unprotected 

message: Are there any "very" high risk templates or modules which need full protection or is template protection adaquate? The guideline is not clear on this matter, and there is an ongoing discussion about the protection of Module:WikiProject banner — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:59, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should some templates be fully protected?