See T192237. Basically the current Oauth consumer does not request access to administrator functions. We should add those functions, but I'm not comfortable doing that without better understanding and/or solving the security implications of T120469.

I first assumed this was using pywikibot, but @Harej explained this was a using the python requests library. At that level PAWS does not add any credential. Though it is possible to send your own Oauth credentials, it will expose credentials to the world and wouldn't be advisable.

One approach that is doable is to use the environment variables with the Oauth credentials used by PAWS (though care should be taken not to expose them to the world).

@Harej Should we turn this to a feature request make PAWS add oAuth credentials to some requests to Wikimedia projects or close it?

I do appreciate the point you brought up above about how I was using the Python Requests library and not the Pywikibot library. Duh, no wonder my session didn't count for anything.

I think the PAWS OAuth grant should, theoretically, entertain the idea of admin actions via PAWS. I don't really have good insight on what form this takes. It could, for example, be two different options for permissions grant: the usual one, and a sudo mode with admin privs attached.

In T196207#5113410, @Harej wrote:

I think the PAWS OAuth grant should, theoretically, entertain the idea of admin actions via PAWS. I don't really have good insight on what form this takes. It could, for example, be two different options for permissions grant: the usual one, and a sudo mode with admin privs attached.

That is T192237. Yeah, we could have multiple Wikimedia oAuth consumers, one without admin permissions to limit attack surface and one with them to allow users to use admin powers. However a lack of oAuth v2 support in mediawiki (T125337) means it would take a lot of PAWS-specific development to get any oAuth done in a safe way(T120469). While I mostly feel confortable leaving that avenue open as it stands, opening the possibility of admin actions through PAWS means a step too far in my view. One year and a day ago I created T192237, since no one has commented there for us to enable admin actions despite the lack of security inherent in the current setup I am taking this as a very niche feature that hopefully can be taken care of once Mediawiki allows oAuth v2.