Auth for large deletions?

[Jon Stanley]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:

> This was a vandal who deleted the entire contents of a page and
> replaced them with a tiny set of gibberish.  I reverted the change of
> course.
>
> Is there a way to require authentication for large changes like this
> while still keeping a page editable by the public?

I'll let one of the MW experts answer for sure, but I don't think so.
Wikipedia has this exact problem and they have a bot that goes through
and reverts such edits immediately (note that since subscribing to the
recent changes RSS feed, I've caught a few of these myself for other
FUDCon's and reverted them)