[WikiEN-l] Template usage?

[Ligulem]

Andrew Gray wrote:
> 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;

This is not true. We have protection for several high use templates 
([[template:cite web]] for example). And I was quite closely watching a 
couple of them. But it was sometimes difficult to convince admins to 
protect some stuff.

I sent several emails to admins in the past to protect such templates 
with varying success. After all, I can't deposit a request on-wiki 
reading "hello, please protect template X, it is used on 20,000 pages" 
(vandals would thank me).

The other problem is that edit requests for templates are afterwards 
largely ignored by admins, because a lot of admins are writing featured 
articles and aren't that much interested in template hacking.

And template experts like AzaToth are opposed on RfA because they didn't 
write any featured article and do not have enough main space edits.

--Ligulem