This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
High-risk templates page. |
|
|
I have a quick question. If we protect high-risk templates from editing, should we not also consider cases of protecting the images transcluded by the template? Doing the former allows us to prevent someone some inserting "My roommate is gay!" into the text of a template, but doesn't stop someone from uploading a photo of genitalia in place of wikiproject's logo on a talk page banner transcluded tens of thousands of times. Imzadi 1979 → 04:10, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
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)
This guideline has always said that changes to fully protected "high risk" templates should be discussed on the talk page. Currently it says: "If fully protected, so that they can only be edited by administrators, these templates should be changed only after consensus for the change has been established on the template's talk page."
Before that it was [1]: "These templates should be edited only by administrators and only after a consensus to change the template has been established on the template's talk page."
Originally it said [2]: "These templates should only be edited by administrators after a consensus to change the template has been established on the template's talk page."
Fully protected "high risk" templates are often changed without any consensus or even any discussion. I could give hundreds of examples, but I'll point out only two atm. The history of Template:Pp-template, a template about this very issue, has many changes not on its corresponding talk page. The other example is Template:Asia topic, where myself and others have made changes without any discussion.
Perhaps there should be consensus for large changes, but this part of the guideline has never reflected reality, and I don't think small changes should require discussion on the talk page. If the underlying reason for this "must be discussed first" is to avoid the performance hits of bad template programming, I think that the problem is over stated and should be deprecated or diminished per WP:PERF. The other reason is to avoid vandalism, and admins arnt vandals so there is no reason to slow them down by requiring they get consensus on the talk page. John Vandenberg ( chat) 11:40, 11 November 2011 (UTC)
It would be nice:
|warning=y
), which is one of the templates I'm still working on; for one thing it 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 {{ strongbad}} 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)
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 {{
guideline}} on it? (Technically it's {{
subcat guideline|editing guideline|...}}
, but you get the point.) —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉
Contribs.
13:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I think edits to the words in templates aren't likely to cause breakage and we shouldn't worry about it much, while edits to complex template code is normally only done by knowledgeable editors, who should follow good practices about testing in a sandbox etc. Maybe with the forthcoming Lua templates, we can figure out a way to separate the words from the code, and then allow protecting the code while leaving the words editable. 66.127.55.46 ( talk) 05:19, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
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)
I was just asked to fulfil a request to add template protection to a user subpage that was intended to be substituted as part of that user's signature. This kind of usage could be argued to fall under clause #3 of this guideline, "It is substituted extremely frequently on an ongoing basis", if that user made a lot of talk page posts, but I don't think the intent of the guideline was to call this kind of usage "high-risk". Should we tighten up the wording here somehow? I'm thinking of something like "It is substituted by multiple users extremely frequently on an ongoing basis", although there are probably better ways to put it. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:27, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
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)
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)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
High-risk templates page. |
|
|
I have a quick question. If we protect high-risk templates from editing, should we not also consider cases of protecting the images transcluded by the template? Doing the former allows us to prevent someone some inserting "My roommate is gay!" into the text of a template, but doesn't stop someone from uploading a photo of genitalia in place of wikiproject's logo on a talk page banner transcluded tens of thousands of times. Imzadi 1979 → 04:10, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
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)
This guideline has always said that changes to fully protected "high risk" templates should be discussed on the talk page. Currently it says: "If fully protected, so that they can only be edited by administrators, these templates should be changed only after consensus for the change has been established on the template's talk page."
Before that it was [1]: "These templates should be edited only by administrators and only after a consensus to change the template has been established on the template's talk page."
Originally it said [2]: "These templates should only be edited by administrators after a consensus to change the template has been established on the template's talk page."
Fully protected "high risk" templates are often changed without any consensus or even any discussion. I could give hundreds of examples, but I'll point out only two atm. The history of Template:Pp-template, a template about this very issue, has many changes not on its corresponding talk page. The other example is Template:Asia topic, where myself and others have made changes without any discussion.
Perhaps there should be consensus for large changes, but this part of the guideline has never reflected reality, and I don't think small changes should require discussion on the talk page. If the underlying reason for this "must be discussed first" is to avoid the performance hits of bad template programming, I think that the problem is over stated and should be deprecated or diminished per WP:PERF. The other reason is to avoid vandalism, and admins arnt vandals so there is no reason to slow them down by requiring they get consensus on the talk page. John Vandenberg ( chat) 11:40, 11 November 2011 (UTC)
It would be nice:
|warning=y
), which is one of the templates I'm still working on; for one thing it 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 {{ strongbad}} 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)
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 {{
guideline}} on it? (Technically it's {{
subcat guideline|editing guideline|...}}
, but you get the point.) —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉
Contribs.
13:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
I think edits to the words in templates aren't likely to cause breakage and we shouldn't worry about it much, while edits to complex template code is normally only done by knowledgeable editors, who should follow good practices about testing in a sandbox etc. Maybe with the forthcoming Lua templates, we can figure out a way to separate the words from the code, and then allow protecting the code while leaving the words editable. 66.127.55.46 ( talk) 05:19, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
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)
I was just asked to fulfil a request to add template protection to a user subpage that was intended to be substituted as part of that user's signature. This kind of usage could be argued to fall under clause #3 of this guideline, "It is substituted extremely frequently on an ongoing basis", if that user made a lot of talk page posts, but I don't think the intent of the guideline was to call this kind of usage "high-risk". Should we tighten up the wording here somehow? I'm thinking of something like "It is substituted by multiple users extremely frequently on an ongoing basis", although there are probably better ways to put it. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 01:27, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
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)
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)