On 10/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
What if one of these people wrote a script and installed it on all of their bots so that they register an account and then randomly attack and vandalise articles? I mean, there could be literally thousands of edits flowing in every minute. Not only would this probably make the servers screech to a grinding halt, it would cause huge damage to the content of the site.
In such an event, what would we do? Semi-protect the entire encyclopedia? Lock the database and quickly install a version control thing, like the germans? Is there anything else? Let's face it, wikipedia is a high-profile target, we need to consider such things.
--Oskar
If such a thing became a problem, we could have a developer do an emergency shutdown of the database while the damage is assessed and a more permanent solution is sough to avoid further damage.
Mgm