Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-15/Cascading protection

A new software feature to guard against sophisticated "indirect" vandalism of the Main Page has been implemented. Dubbed "cascading protection", it automatically applies to local images and templates, which have been frequent targets for this type of vandalism.

As a very high-traffic page, the Main Page has long been an attractive target for vandals. Because it includes a constantly changing variety of elements, vulnerabilities have occasionally appeared when nobody thinks to protect a new element, or even an element of an element. The feature, which "cascades" the regular protection feature down to such elements, was developed primarily by Andrew Garrett (User:Werdna). Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber enabled it in the MediaWiki software and applied cascading protection to the Main Page at 09:55 (UTC) on 14 January.

Cascading protection operates as follows: If a page is protected using the feature, any pages included in it will also be protected for as long as they remain included in it. This protection should take effect instantly and automatically even if templates are included dynamically by a mechanism such as that used by the Main Page. Administrators can enable cascading protection by means of a checkbox on the usual protection form.

Vibber pointed out that cascading protection does not apply to images hosted on the Wikimedia Commons. This means that the image will need to be protected manually by an administrator on the Commons project. In the first few months of that project, complaints were voiced about its responsiveness to such requests, but now the matter is handled fairly routinely.