[e-lang] wiki clock wrong? Also, access control...

[Dean Tribble]

I would be happy to require accounts (much like LTU) for contributions, and
captcha for accounts.  Perhaps a monthly message to the list with a link to
the wiki and instructions for getting an account would encourage more
participation.  Finally, there are MediaWiki components to bridge to other
wiki acounts systems.  That would allow users who registered elsewhere to
contribute.  It would be great, for example, if all LTU accounts could
contribute using their LTU account.

Is it feasible to have anonymous contributions require approval from, for
example, any non-anonymous contributor?  If the rate of change from spam is
higher than the rate of useful change, that would be less total effort :)

OK Now I'm off to make sure *I* have an account....

On 7/1/07, Kevin Reid <kpreid at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 30, 2007, at 23:11, Mark Miller wrote:
>
> > More interestingly, I notice that virtually all recent changes are
> > either made by spambots, or made by us to reverse the damage, and
> > to banish the accounts of the spambots. ... Should we instead shift
> > to requiring new accounts to be manually approved?
>
> I think we should. If we do, we should make it clear that requests
> for accounts are not a big deal.
>
> Using a captcha is also reasonable, *if* it helps (but we should make
> manual requests also an option in that case).
>
> > Given that Wikipedia is clearly more of a target than we are, and
> > that they would seem to be even more vulnerable than we are (they
> > don't require a login before posting), I don't understand how they
> > survive. Can anyone explain how they handle these issues?
>
> Speculation: Wikipedia does not actually get proportionally more --
> this particular attack seems to me to be spread across all
> MediaWikis. I haven't been watching Wikipedia's changes, though -- it
> would be hard to notice these in the volume of normal edits.
>
> Also, I don't think they're significantly more vulnerable, in that
> account creation is only a constant factor more effort than anonymous
> editing.
>
> Also, Wikipedia has far more editors and far more pages than we do,
> of course. What we don't know is whether the attack volume is more on
> Wikipedia, less on Wikipedia, or even per-page rather than per-wiki
> (e.g. search the web for MediaWiki pages and attack them regardless
> of wiki site).
>
> Also, they may well ignore Wikipedia, e.g. if the intent is to spam
> small *unmaintained* wikis.
>
> --
> Kevin Reid                            <http://homepage.mac.com/kpreid/>
>
>
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