Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-5706109-20121220183815/@comment-1863391-20121220191252

Many templates are high-traffic and changes to them don't appear in Special:WikiActivity (which most editors monitor more frequently than RecentChanges). Even if a good-willed user tries to improve a template, he/she might break it instead and the damage could go unnoticed for a long period of time. It's not uncommon for a wiki's administration to be paranoid about this, and I don't think Wikia has a problem with that.

Here's what you can do -
 * Urge your wiki's admin team to unlock certain templates, or all of them. I'm more partial to restricting high-traffic templates to auto-confirmed users only - you could ask them to do that instead.
 * Post suggestions on the template's talk page. Point your wiki's admins to the page if they don't notice it.
 * Copy the contents of the page to your own test subpage (such as Template:Example/Redchair) or perhaps in your user space (such as User:Redchair/Template:Example). You can then do what you wish to your version and then ask an admin to propagate the changes to the real template.