[WikiEN-l] Admin burnout

[Gurch]

geni wrote:
> You want to try dealing with vandels who you can't effectively block
> and can hit every page one wikipedia?

When I left, the delay between me hitting the "save" button to post my 
de-adminship request on Meta and the sysop bit being removed was about 
150 seconds. That included time spent indicating to the steward handling 
the request, via IRC, that I really did want to be de-adminned.

So I fail to see where this inability to block comes in. That's a lot 
quicker than the response time for the average AIV request, for example. 
The stewards know what to do; in an emergency, they would be able to act 
just as fast, if not faster.

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 matter what those actions are, 
they can be reversed, usually quickly. Simply making as many blocks or 
deletions as possible would have no lasting effect. Changing the various 
MediaWiki pages could do all sorts of things, but such changes can be 
reverted like any others (at most, someone would need to disable 
JavaScript and select a custom skin in order to do so). 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.

-Gurch