[WikiEN-l] Admin burnout

[geni]

On 2/11/07, Gurch <matthew.britton at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Experience when we had something that certainly appeared to be a rouge
admin suggests otherwise

> 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).

Um no. I've carried out actions that directly match the first stage of
some attacks. No one noticed.

> No matter what those actions are,
> they can be reversed, usually quickly.

That simply isn't the case

> 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).

Haveing the goatse on every page would not be good for wikipedia's
reputation but that isn't the most lethal attack line.

> 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
>

I have deleted some pages with histories of over 1000 edits from time
to time (Biology comes to mind). There are ways to do it and there was
no comment by anyone.

-- 
geni