There's recently been a spate of extensive vandalism to high-use
transcluded templates - the other night I dealt with dozens of OTRS
complaints which could be traced back to someone (or multiple
someones) vandalising {{cquote}}, {{otheruses}} & {{taxobox}} in the
same manner. I've seen this form of vandalism before ({{bio-stub}} is
the one I recall...), but rarely to the same extent - any particular
vandal incident is rare if it generates two or three seperate
complaint emails, and there were bucketfuls here.
I've seen protection for high-profile templates like this mentioned
before, but never implemented; after I mentioned these attacks on
WP:AN, someone protected all three. Is anyone capable of coming up
with a list of all individual templates transcluded on, say, more than
a couple of hundred pages? Even if we don't *protect* these (I
strongly suggest we do - they mostly shouldn't be edited without a
good reason, much like the MediaWiki messages), having a few dozen
admins watchlisting them would be helpful.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk