[WikiEN-l] [Fwd: Re: Deletion of large pages]

[Risker]

On 03/02/2008, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> From wikitech-l. Apologies if this is a duplicate, Gmane doesn't like me.
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: Deletion of large pages
> Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:34:12 +1100
> From: Tim Starling
>
> Majorly wrote:
> > On 04/02/2008, Tim Starling <
> tstarling-AeOJrEpdGNeGglJvpFV4uA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >> Matthew Britton wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> Remember the revision limit on page deletions that was
> >>> hacked in to prevent Wikimedia grinding to a halt every
> >>> time someone tried to delete a large page?
> >>>
> >>> Well, give someone a feature and they will abuse it in ways
> >>> you never thought possible. Bots are now being used to add
> >>> thousands of revisions to pages to make them un-deleteable.
> >>> See the history of the English Wikipedia's Main Page for an
> >>> example.
> >>>
> >>> Just thought you should know.
> >> I'm going to block anyone who does this.
> >
> > It has been done already. See the Main Page history on enwiki.
> >
>
> I know, and I blocked BetacommandBot for it. After working out the full
> details of what happened here, I'd like to additionally propose that
> East718 be desysopped for his involvement in it.
>
> East718 and Betacommand got together, and decided between themselves,
> apparently without review or approval by any other party, that they would
> add 1200 junk revisions to the main page. Betacommand edited
> [[User:East718/empty]] the requisite number of times, and then East718
> deleted the main page, moved his subpage to [[Main Page]], and then
> undeleted it to merge the histories.
>
> I would like the community to consider desysopping East718 for abuse of
> admin powers. I'm cc-ing this message to wikien-l for community review of
> this proposal.
>
> -- Tim Starling



Perhaps some additional history may be useful to the readers of this list.
It's likely  that this IAR action  was taken as a direct result of something
that happened earlier today.  Other adminstrators were on IRC discussing
whether or not the main page was able to be deleted.  And one of them tried
it - and found out that it *could* be deleted. (Full thread on ANI, but I
understand this is a permanent link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=188897434#User:ChrisO_gaming_WP:AE)

Rather than take anyone to task for experimenting on a live page, it seems
that other admins took it upon themselves to ensure this couldn't happen
again, without fully understanding the implications or discussing the
situation with a developer.

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