On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 03:50:16PM +1100, Tim Starling wrote:
I know, and I blocked BetacommandBot for it. After working out the full details of what happened here, I'd like to additionally propose that East718 be desysopped for his involvement in it.
I agree that adding the revisions seems to have been done hastily and without enough consultation. For reasons that are probably based on now-historical properties of the wiki, many admins have a deep fear about the main page being deleted.
I don't think this one action is enough on its own to warrant removing the sysop bit under the established practices of enwiki. There are admins who have done much more foolish things and not been desysoped. For example, I think the admins whose password was 'password' were allowed to keep their sysop bit once the password was changed. In any case, it would be up to arbcom to decide whether to remove the bit or pursue any other sanctions.
Tim, I think your statement here is clear - don't add extra revisions to a page just to prevent it from being deleted. I'm sure this will get announced more widely over the next few days, and hopefully the issue won't come up again for a while.
- Carl