Thread:Talk:How to contribute/Cascade protection against ALL edits in ALL translations/reply (5)

Actually the recursive protection should not affect pages in another translation namespace than the original, except if a translation in a target language is protected in the same language. If you protect a base Englishh page which is the source for marking a translation this hould have no consequences on the protection of translations that are in separate subpages, whuch are NOT included in the English page. The same is true is you protect a German page (this should not affect the French or Arabic one). The protection however may recurse from the generated translated subpage to its included translated units in the same language.

This is independant of the kind of protection (full protection for admins only, or semi-protection for some approved users connected with a registered account or belonging to some other groups allowing edits).

Cascading protection are very dangerous (frequently it protects too many things due to complex inclusions of various other templates that could include some parts which are not critical or not really generated in the final rendered page, beause of #if/#switch conditions). When someone activates the cascade, the list of pages included in the set should be made visible so that exceptions remain possible; and the hierarchy of the cascade should be visible as a tree. I've too frequently seen cascaded protections used that affect really too many pages (most of them not critical and not really included). But the bad is that once it is set, the initial adm!in making it forgets it (often for long, even when the page no is no longer "hot in the news" and they can be brought back to normal mode with vbery few users actually modifying it. Even if a template is used on lots of pages, it is rarely justified to activate permanent full protection, unless that template is so wellknown and constinues to be used on large scales that any modificatin to it could affect many pages with severe performance degradation.

If a template is protected, it should include a sandbox version and a parameter to activate the sandbox for testing proposed changes correctly. Semi-protection (allowing edits by long-time experienced editors with an account) is less a problem when there are more people allowing to reach this leval than just a few elected admins (whose work is nbot to close the project but just maintain it viable and fix only the critical things that take too much time to fix/revert frequently). Wikimedia projects should not be "owned" by just a few admins (this has been a cause for many people leaving the projects despite of their good-faith efforts, even if they made some minor changes that cause unexpected problems, often not documented and not discussed anywhere or just in a wrong place difficult to locate: users should not have to perform extensive searches in lots of talk pages to find the possible caveats that a change could cause).