Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:38 UTC
Cascading protection does not affect transclusions wrapped with <includeonly>, which affects content in protected templates or pages like "Project:Protected inexistent pages".
This is difficult to fix (the list of included templates is created in a parse operation) and of limited value. The intention of the cascading page protection feature is to protect a page against template vandalism, not to provide hacks to protect non-existent pages. Protecting non-existent pages should be a separate feature. Propose WONTFIX.
It seems logical for cascade protection to work properly whether the page is transcluded or viewed directly. The parse operation that generates the list shouldn't strip either <noinclude> or <includeonly> sections. I'm surprised if we don't have an option for that lying around somewhere, but it seems logical to add if we don't. I don't see what this has to do with protection of nonexistent pages (bug 2919)?
The intention of cascading protection is to protect the "final product" page - the one displayed to the user... not the actual page text itself - the raw content stored in the text table. To do this, the templates included on the page need to be protected - but the ones in includeonly needn't be, because they're not shown on the final page displayed to users. Anyway, as I said, this is a fairly difficult bug to fix, because it involves re-parsing things, as opposed to piggybacking off parse operations that would have occurred anyway (as the behaviour is currently). This is problematic from a performance perspective. As I'm not involved with the project in any meaningful way anymore, I shan't close this. However, I would recommend it be closed as WONTFIX.
