Gurch wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
I can think of an approach right off the top of my head to cause major havoc using my admin powers that I wouldn't be able to undo with any conventional tools.
If the servers were being exceptionally responsive, you might just manage 40 edits/actions before you were stopped, assuming someone using IRC noticed your first action (which, if they are intended to have the effect you suggest, is pretty likely).
No, you misunderstand what I mean by "major havoc". For implicitly hard-to-revert damage subtle is much "better" primarily because it isn't noticed right away. Inserting just one paragraph of copyvio into an existing article compared to cut-and-pasting whole websites, for example. This can go unnoticed for months or even years and possibly taint a lot of subsequent work.
About the worst you could do is try to do history merges on pages with long edit histories (which are still reversible, just tedious to do), but the amount of time they take you'd be lucky if you finished *one* in three minutes. Also, attempting this on a page with a very long history will likely just return a database timeout error (as does attempting to clear a very large watchlist, for example), inconveniencing nobody but yourself.
I sometimes do history merges as part of my routine activities on Wikipedia, usually correcting old cut-and-paste moves that weren't noticed until lots of additional work had been done. If I were to start occasionally merging inappropriate histories while still using plausible-sounding delete/move/undelete summaries and leaving behind correct-looking current versions it might be a while before anyone noticed. Especially if I'm not stupid enough to try doing it to [[George W. Bush]] and [[Main Page]].
The point is that this is something bad admins can do that's not easily undoable. If lots of vandals were admins the whack-a-mole approach of responding to their actions after the fact would become untenable, so some care must be taken with giving the ability out.