Forum:Prevent accidental edits to templates?

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Hey, I'm kinda new to wikis and stuff. I made my first attempt of a template here: w:c:wonderlandonline:Template:Pet And you can see an example of how it looks in action here: w:c:wonderlandonline:Xaolan. The only problem is that twice now people have wanted to add/edit information on a pet's page like my Xaolan example above, clicked edit under a section such as How to Obtain, and just plopped the info directly into the template (thus messing it up for the other pet pages).

I put HTML comments inside the template page alerting editors that they may be editing the wrong thing. But it happened again even after that. It is really only a minor annoyance, since I get email updates when it happens and it only takes a few minutes to fix. But just out of curiosity, is there a better way to handle this that might prevent people from accidentally overwriting the template?

--Deraxian 08:29, December 3, 2009 (UTC)

If you're an administrator, you could protect it so only administrators can edit it. Full protection like that isn't really the preferred method of dealing with issues like that, but since it's not an edit war or anything then it's the most effective way of preventing people from editing the template. I'd advise you only to do that as a last resort. - Brandon Rhea ^(talk) 08:37, December 3, 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, our admin is MIA, and even if I was admin, I'm not too sure about that. I'm sure my template could be improved upon by other people, and locking it down would prevent that. Is there a way to disable the edit links within the page so that people have to click "Edit this page" at the top rather than clicking Edit next to a section that will redirect them to the template? That's really all that the problem is. As long as they click "Edit this page" they will see the parameters and know where to add info or make changes. Or perhaps it's just a bad idea to have a template that includes multiple sections like this in the first place, I don't really know. --Deraxian 08:44, December 3, 2009 (UTC)

Problem solved! :-) Thanks a bunch to UberFuzzy for pointing it out, all we had to do was use <h2>HTML</h2> instead of ==This== for my section headers. --Deraxian 09:40, December 3, 2009 (UTC)