Recovering a wiki from rogue admins

A concern of less experienced MediaWiki sysadmins is the risk of a takeover by an administrator or bureaucrat gone rogue or trying to consolidate power. Sometimes this results in the creation of a single user group for the specific purpose of allowing the sysadmin to maintain absolute authority, or reluctance to give bureaucrat status to other users. MediaWiki has an easy way to create replacement bureaucrat accounts from the command line, rendering such cautious methods unnecessary.

User creation maintenance script
MediaWiki has a script accessible from the command line that can create new administrator and bureaucrat accounts for recovering bureaucrat access after usurpation.

If the highest group on the wiki is not bureaucrat, a hacked version of the script can be uploaded to allow account creation with the necessary user group.

Security note on administrators
Even though administrators cannot "take over" wikis in the sense of being able to revoke user rights, they can create malicious attacks against wikis. Admin status should not be handed out liberally just because bureaucrats maintain control over user rights management. Administrators are able to edit system message pages (MediaWiki: prefixed pages) including pages that allow creation of scripts and programs that can be used to do things like hijack accounts or steal authorization tokens. A rogue administrator could potentially create malicious scripts to gain access to bureaucrat accounts or steal and sell login credentials of users.