Wikipedia:Don't delete the main page

Historical context

As honored in the village stocks, this succeeds the admin who locked the servers for half an hour by deleting the Sandbox, necessitating the restriction of deletions for pages with over 5,000 edits. It is followed by the editor who used a bot to add 1,200 useless edits to the Main Page, hoping to bring it up to the 5000-edit level where it would not be deletable. Fortunately, the English Wikipedia Main Page now enjoys a sui generis immunity to deletion in the software.^[1][2]

See also

 

Following this incident, the vulnerability was addressed. If a person tries now, they should receive the message shown above: "you can't delete or move the main page." This is not an excuse to try to delete the Main Page. It might work! (We mean the deletion might work‍—‌not the excuse.)

• Main Page log
• Wikipedia:Silly things/Template:Uw-delmain1
• Wikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose
• Wikipedia:Bad Idea Machine
• Wikipedia:Village stocks – other very bad ideas that have been tried
• Wikipedia:April fools/April Fools' Day 2004/Delete the main page

Notes

References

1. Fwd: Re: Deletion of large pages Tim Starling, WikiEN-l Mailing List, February 4, 2008.
2. The code that implements the protection

Wikipedia essays (?)
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