User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4624313-20130908203233/@comment-188432-20130910205111

SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: Please don't create templates before anything's decided. You can either write it all out as a user subpage (then link to transclude it), or simply put all the coding in the message itself. Actually, it's not against policy to create proposed templates in the template namespace. Putting it in the template namespace means that people can collaborate on it without issue. If you put it on a user page, then there's the question of whether other people are violating T:UVAN to work on "your" user page. When I make a template in my user pages, I absolutely think they're protected by T:UVAN, and if you come in and mess with 'em, I'll not be happy. For instance, my signature is a template in my user pages. You have absolutely no business messing with my sig.

The only stipulations of making a "proposed" template in the template namespace are that you put it in — and only in — Category:Template sandbox and that you not deploy it on a wide scale before getting community approval.

The reason that you want to get community approval for something like this is that:
 * the community almost certainly will have helpful additions
 * it'll take you hours to manually deploy it and me no more than 400 seconds to remove it