In order to keep some control over the "look" of our site, we'd like to restrict creating and editing of "Template:" pages to sysops; users could request new templates, and if we were satisfied they were of general interest, we'd create them, and document then on our template documentation page.
I'm aware that there is no standard mechanism for assigning particular access privileges based on namespace (we don't really want to use one of the custom plugins unless it's pretty sure it will end up in the next version of MW), but is there any "good" (semi-approved) way to write-protect this particular namespace?
Thanks, Ken