==== Description:
The current practice for protecting a page is to:
# change the status to protected via the protection form
# add a [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Protection_templates | protection template ]] to the page
The purpose of this task is to discuss and decide if MediaWiki should automatically added some similar/equivalent notice to the page automatically (rather than an editor adding a protection template to the page manually).
**Indicators already present **
- Wikibase displays an indicator today on pages with structured data (Q, P, L spaces on Wikidata, all images on Commons with/including SDC)
- "View source" rather than "Edit" for other pages
==== Tradeoffs
**Downsides of editors adding templates manually:**
- Requires extra editor attention
- Either an editor needs to add/remove or the project needs to spin up a bot; neither scale
- Without attention, protection status of the page is not accurately reflected in an obvious way (besides the current indication, see "already present" above)
- Adds two extra edits to a page's history (one when the page is protected to add the template, and a second one, after the protection expires, to remove it) in addition to the protection revision history lines
- When added to a template, requires all transclusions to update
- Clutters source
- Inconsistent behavior across wikis causes confusion
- A common pattern for admins on English Wikipedia: a page is protected with Twinkle, automatically adding the template, but the page needs to be further reverted to remove vandalism, requiring //another// edit to re-add the template again
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**Downsides of MediaWiki adding notices automatically:**
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See Also:
* {T64554}
* Proposed in #community-wishlist-survey-2016. Received 31 support votes, ranked #50 out of 265 proposals. [[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Categories/Admins_and_stewards#CW2016-R050 | View full proposal with discussion and votes here ]].