[WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

[Steve Summit]

NSLE wrote:
> ...problems we've been having with the TFA each day on the main
> page (vandals inserting shock images into transcluded-on-transcluded
> templates).

[This is armchair speculation by a reader who is not as expert in
these matters as he might be; apologies if I'm completely off-base.]

If nothing else, this indicates another reason why nested-
transclusion is problematic, and why complexity like this ought
perhaps to be avoided.  (But of course this observation does
nothing to solve the current problem.)

This strikes me as a problem that might be amenable to a
technical solution.  Perhaps we need some new, more-stringent
form of protection which is automatically honored not only by
the protected page, but by any other content which it includes,
transcludes, or otherwise references.  Or, perhaps there should
be a "recursive protect" button, which applies (normal) protection
to every page included by a given page.

(I don't know enough about how the various inclusion mechanisms
are implemented to be able to say how easy or hard either of
these solutions might be, but I suspect they wouldn't be
impossible.)