As far as I know, the recursion limit is just 1 (an error should have occurred when trying to use this template inside itself even just once)
However, I want there to be a debugging-purpose feature to allow a higher recursion limit for templates, such as $wgRecursionLimit (which defaults to 1). I also don't know how you set an expansion depth limit, and I would want to know how the MediaWiki.org administrators did that. For example, if $wgRecursionLimit is 10, a template named Template:Forever with this content:
{{{1}}}
{{Forever|{{{1}}}}}
should look like this:
{{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} {{{1}}} Template loop detected: Template:Forever
Note: However an expansion depth limit is set, the expansion depth limit should have to be >= $wgRecursionLimit