Last modified: 2008-07-08 16:10:10 UTC
On Wikimedia commons the material which most often needs to be reviewed is not article text but *template text*. We have a great many complicated and/or important templates. Some are used on hundreds of thousands of pages. We prefer our templates be open to editing but we then run the risk of high-impact vandalism, or the insertion of dubious instructions getting missed. Iff flagged revisions could be used in a mode where only the latest revision with a particular flag (or better) is transcluded we could keep our templates open to editing and avoid the problems involved in open editing. The support would need to be smart enough to not trigger reparsing of the transcluding pages except when the flag hsa been set on a new revision. This would also allow us to batch multiple changes to a high-usage template into a single expensive purge operation. No difference in behavior or display for transcluding pages while there is a pending template change would be desired.
Oh, also... Just to make things extra fun: It would be ideal if there mechanism to preview a page with all the most current templates (rather than just the flagged ones), so that a newly revised template could be tested before being pushed without having to fork it for testing.
See $wgUseStableTemplates Preview still uses the current version.
