> Mo' better Wikipedia griefing

Bruce Reynolds

Found this recently on wikitech-l. Thought it good for a laff:

QUOTE

Matthew Britton matthew.britton at btinternet.com
Mon Feb 4 01:39:15 UTC 2008

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.

Thanks,

-Gurch

Now I know that the interest of many or most here is in deleting pages, but this is sorta cute -- put up [[Linda Mack]] or [[Gary Weiss is Mantanmoreland]] and make 5k edits before they can delete it!

wikiwhistle

QUOTE(Bruce Reynolds @ Sat 9th February 2008, 9:52pm)

Now I know that the interest of many or most here is in deleting pages, but this is sorta cute -- put up [[Linda Mack]] or [[Gary Weiss is Mantanmoreland]] and make 5k edits before they can delete it!

Rofl! Who's up for it?

cyofee

Hey, this is nice. Tim Starling wants to desysop east.718 for adding 5000 junk edits to the Main Page to protect it from deletion

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikit...ary/036223.html

guy

So which admins think it's a good idea to delete the Main Page?

LamontStormstar

Why's Tim Starling think what they did was so bad?

BobbyBombastic

Tim Starling was probably pissed off that he had to waste his time writing a hack so that it's impossible for admins to do stupid things like this (deletion of the main page pissed him off). He is a paid employee, probably with better things to do than clean up after juvenile wikipedia admins.

It is an embarrassing thing when you are a part of running an organization and the goofball admins of your site are deleting the main page for personal experiments. That isn't the type of thing that inspires me to donate.

PS, this happened a while ago, I thought we talked about it somewhere :/

One

We did (or at least I did).

Nathan

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sun 10th February 2008, 1:11am)

Tim Starling was probably pissed off that he had to waste his time writing a hack so that it's impossible for admins to do stupid things like this (deletion of the main page pissed him off). He is a paid employee, probably with better things to do than clean up after juvenile wikipedia admins.

I don't blame him. I'd be pissed off too.

Somey

QUOTE(Nathan @ Sun 10th February 2008, 8:08pm)

I don't blame him. I'd be pissed off too.

Well I wouldn't be... If I were in charge of Wikipedia, I'd be deleting the Main Page pretty much all the time!

Along with all the other pages...