Thomas Dalton wrote:
It would take a few minutes at the very best to desysop a provisional admin that started vandalising - how much damage do you think an AdminVandalBot could do in that time? I imagine it would be hours normal-admin time to cleanup.
Of course, when making this assessment you are assuming the current MediaWiki software. Unfortunately, the current software is inefficient at undoing large amounts of activity. For example, the User Contributions page should have an "undo all of this user's contributions" button, especially if it isn't many. At the same time, this undoing of all contributions should also be undoable with a single command. There should also be a selective feature, e.g. undo only all image uploads or undo only the article edits that involve adding an external link. All of these are non-trivial to code, which is why no-one has done it yet, but it would make cleaning up after vandalism much more efficient, even if the vandal is himself an admin.
Timwi