[WikiEN-l] Admin burnout

[Bryan Derksen]

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.