Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk>]

On 03/04/10 14:40, Dror Levin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 16:19, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> 2 - maintainers
>> ===============
>>
>> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
>> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
>> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
>> forums we'll get some users interested as well.
> I volunteer. Spam shouldn't be that much of an issue if editing is
> restricted to registered users, but it is a good idea to have a team
> of moderators similar to the one that exists for the forums (of course
> users can take part of it as well as developers).
> 
Most of the spam on gentoo-wiki.com comes from registered accounts.
Requiring registration does not stop most wiki spam. Very little of the
spam comes in from unregistered editors.


On gentoo-wiki.com we currently use a combination of anti-spam tools,
which seems to work best. The main 2, from a day-to-day administration
view are the url blacklist and manual removal of spam and associated
accounts.

You could require email authentication first, but I believe this is
unlikely to reduce spam - creating a setup that automatically deals with
account verification emails is trivial and throwaway accounts are too
easy to get hold of.

In addition I believe it would reduce the amount of positive
contribution more than it reduces spam - I believe people often want to
make quick, small corrections / additions and telling them to "come back
later" is going to be the same as telling them "go away".

I would highly recommend using MediaWiki as, at least from my
experience, it's the most prevalent of the wiki setups available. While
this may bring some disadvantages (number of spam attempts (tho I'm
nottotally convinced you'll get less than any other web form out there),
etc), it also brings the advantages of being well developed with a wide
variety of plugins, lots of wiki syntax guides / tutorials you can point
users to and a wide userbase with existing knowledge of the syntax.

AllenJB