Last modified: 2014-09-27 16:00:54 UTC
What happens if an user account that has the admin privileges, or has the nuke right set, had their account compromised? What if the hacker discovered this Special:Nuke page and decided that "oh, I shall completely destroy Wikipedia and all it's pages! MWAHAHAHHA!". It would be extremely hard to restore all pages back again if the WMF servers do not backup. Maybe we should add a revert option so other admins, with that sad look, still have a chance to get Wikipedia back and running again by reverting a mass delete without having to contact the MySQL server directly. If an admin account gets compromised now, all pages are currently at risk of being mass deleted by a hacker who hacked into a sysop's account, and right now, it is extremely hard to undo.
Real use case from yesterday, on Portuguese Wikipedia: https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=40162059&oldid=40049699&uselang=en https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=40158734&oldid=40149495&uselang=en https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=40158409&oldid=40156146&uselang=en The accidental mass delete was reverted using https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/delete.py but it would be more convenient to have something available in the MW interface.
