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

[Dean Tribble]

...and I just took a look at the site.  Wow; the current contributors have
done an awesome job!

On 7/1/07, Dean Tribble <tribble at e-dean.com> wrote:
>
> 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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> >
>
>
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