By using the usermod -G command I managed to remove my id from the wheel group and not notice straight away. The first I noticed that something was wrong was when the Gnome authentication dialog asked for the “administrator” (or could have been “admin”) password. However, no such user exists on my Fedora workstation. How gnome-shell goes about looking for and deciding what admin user to ask for is discussed here. Because sudo caches the right to elevate I was able to use the usermod -a -G command to put my id back into the wheel group. If I hadn’t noticed my mistage and logged out, rebooted or simply waited too long I would have (temporarily) lost root access to my workstation because no other user id on the workstation was a member of the wheel group and the root user is not enabled by default. The cache mode of sudo made for a quick recovery from this error!