Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-8072-20160419225958/@comment-9605025-20170325104344

The long an short of it is that vandalism is not the only reason for protecting a page. It may be protected because of high traffic and, as Tupka217 noted, the associated risk of the "well-intended but incompetent passerby". Also, pages such as templates may be protected as a preemptive measure against major vandalism; especially if you have a lot of pages that use it. For instance, the Yu-Gi-Oh! wiki has thousands of pages that use the card template. Even if it has not yet been vandalized, it is desirable to prevent it from occurring in the first place as vandalism of the template would propagate to the thousands of other pages.