On 08/01/07, bbatsell wikipedia@theskeptik.com wrote:
These steps are so tedious and error-prone that we have screwed up numerous times already, and that has been exploited. I'm not sure how many more times we can allow pictures of cleft penii or vaginal sores ON OUR FRONT PAGE without losing tremendous amounts of credibility.
With regards to yesterday's ranting, this is a perfectly appropriate example of what automation of administrative tasks should be used for... but I would see no reason the code can't be released. There's no complex checks involved a vandal can game if they know the details, simply generating a list of all transclusions from a single page and then setting protection for each. Unless the bot does something I'm not understanding, releasing the code gives no loss of security and allows the community to feel a lot more comfortable permitting it.
As an aside, every minute a vandalised image is covering the main page, we serve it up to around two thousand people (give or take 50% based on time of day, etc). Something to bear in mind.