I have to say, that was kinda awe-inspiring.

Admin Scientizzle caused sheer mayhem and shut down Wikipedia for 90 minutes by deleting the Sandbox.. It was the longest 90 minutes of my entire, rather sad life.

Ooh, not even Ed Poor could have topped that. Did it come back by itself or did it require Developer intervention?

Brion had to get involved. Apparently, now there's a revisions cap of 5,000 entries on deleting files.

One wonders how many other sectors of the data base are similar single points of failure.

Only a few hours before that, Ike9898's account was compromised, and the resulting mischief caused "the database servers to lock up while they caught up and the whole site went into read-only mode":

I'm trying to understand why this would have such a profound effect. Is it because The Sandbox has an extraordinary number of edits in it's history? When you delete something are you actually moving data from one area to another in the database? Could someone please explain?

Yes - it's the massive edit history. The servers basically get bogged down marking every single revision as deleted. From what I can see, the guy was doing a delete-to-selectively-restore (so-called "admin oversight") to remove source-code to a virus that someone else posted about the place. Either way, the poor guy is both embarrassed and laughing right now ....

Large software sites lurch along from one crisis to the next.

Thanks, Alison.

I thought an admin called Laurence-something did it? And at one point they thought Something Awful forum members were involved.

That was a different event. A sysop account got compromised, unblocked the mainpage and deleted the "atheism" article. Tarantino mentions it above.

We all know the truth, Alison tried to blow up Wikipedia and almost succeeded..

and she would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids and their dog!

The mainpage is now mightily difficult to unprotect now, it is cascade protected from 10 different pages so you would have to unprotect all of them at once, before someone noticed.

... Foz reaches over and tears off the rubber mask

*gasp!!* "And all along it was .... Mr. Wales!!!"

This is what 5000 revisions look like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&action=history

(warning browser lockup occured for a while loading that)

Ah yes the Hierarchs have imposed new protections. All ten seals must be broken before the true prize can be claimed!

That only goes back to september last year. Is there a way I can work out how many revisions there are?

edit: Having a go at loading 20000 revisions. My browser is not liking it very much. In fact it liked it so little it only gave me 2 extra days of revisions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&action=history

The maximum revisions you can get on a single page is 5000, no matter what you set &limit= to.

Yes, I worked that out.

Does this mean that articles with more than 5,000 revisions are undeleteable, or does it mean the "Delete" key will only affect the most recent 5,000 revisions on said article?

Greg

As I understand it, MediaWiki will display an error message, so I guess those files are now beyond the remit of the average admin now.

Well, that gives me a beautiful idea, then.

Eh-oh! What have I said ....

Now you've went and done it...

I just need about 500 accomplices willing to put in 10 edits worth of time, in assigned 3-minute shifts. In 24 hours, my team of 500 could permanently install an article in Wikipedia, FOREVER!

Ha ha... you can't delete Carolyn Bothwell Doran, because it has 5,000 edits now!

Muuuwahhh-ha-haah-haaaaaah ! ! !

*ahem* - sorry now to throw a spanner in the works an' all, but there's the small matter of page protection. I suspect also that Brion will come up with a mechanism for getting around the problem.

BTW - I've not seen anyone discussing the new MediaWiki feature re. being able to protect a non-existent page without using cascade protection (or SALTing). It's possible now to make any redlink uneditable by just clicking the 'protect' option.

Neat feature, that... arrrr! I just need about 500 accomplices willing to put in 10 article blocks worth of time, in assigned 3-minute shifts. In 24 hours, my team of 500 could permanently prevent Greg's minions from creating 5000 different articles, while they only managed to prevent the deletion of ONE! Only 4,995,000 more articles to go and WP would be permanently safe from his depredations.

Surely there are easier ways to game the system for fun and profit.

[/tongue-in-cheek scheme]

...although the idea of a "vandal tree" might be worth further discrete consideration.

Arrange with your friendly local botnet owner to command his botnet to request history lists of much-edited articles. Each request is for 5000 edit histories. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I saw a botnet hitting my large site for a five-minute session, once per day on three consecutive days. I'm convinced it was merely a non-malicious test, because it never happened again. There were over 500 different IP addresses from all over the world that hit my site during each of those five-minute periods. I could tell it was a botnet because each request was of a similar nature.

If Brion does not come up with something fast, this thing will be abused. Save early and save often. Save every new sentence. Save every spelling mistake you correct. Who would see any malice in that? Just get that article to 5000 edits and it is beyond deletionism.

Surely Brion has done nothing he can't get round. He can delete the article. No doubt there will soon be a new type of privileged user (superdeleter?)

Look! Down in the code! It's a scam! It's a pain! It's Superdeleter!

Faster than a screaming troll. More powerful than a Lego Brick. Able to leak all secrets in a single blog. And who, disguised as mild mannered hacker for the Wikiplanet, fights a never-ending battle for truthiness, cultiness, and the Wikian way.

I'm In.... mail me..

Oh, so why not redirect the 5,000 edit article to a redlink - and protect/salt it? Who needs Brion?

A 500 member botnet is reliatively small. Big ones get ino the tens of thousands millions: http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/172303160 .