[e-lang] wiki.erights.org and anonymous edits

[Toby Murray]

Hi e-lang,

I'm writing to suggest that anonymous edits of wiki.erights.org be
disabled. The amount of spam from anonymous edits and the effort
required to revert spammy edits is incredibly frustrating.

Some (possibly flawed statistics, gathered by grepping the RecentChanges
logs from the wiki):

(Below, "changes" include blocking IP addresses etc.)

Total changes in last 365 days: 564
Total changes in last 365 days excluding those by anonymous users: 486
Total changes in last 365 days excluding logged-in users: 46

There is an obvious discrepancy here since 564 != 486 + 46 so these
numbers aren't perfect but perhaps still representative.

This means that somewhere around 46 - 78 changes were by non-logged-in
users or roughly 8-14%. (Note that there 

There were 48 changes last year which had the word "reverted" in their
descriptions. 30 of these also mentioned an IP address, meaning that
they were very likely reversions of anonymous edits. (Note that there
were also 31 changes described using the word "blocked" that mention IP
addresses.) The remainder were reversions of legitimate edits or
occurred before 3rd February 2008. I'm hooping someone can confirm that
reCAPTCHA was put into use around that time or soon thereafter.

The point being that there seem to be almost no (if any) valuable
anonymous edits to the wiki.

48 doesn't sound like a lot of reversions over the course of a year.
However, in the last 30 days alone there have been 22 reversions of
"anonymous" edits and 20 changed described using the word "blocked",
implying at least 20 odd times when someone has had to revert an edit
and block the IP of a changer. This is more than once every two days.

There were 106 changes in the last 30 days. Of these, 42 (at least) were
to combat spam from anonymous users, meaning almost 40% of the total
edits on the wiki were simply to keep it clean.

Surely we're losing far more than we're gaining by continuing to allow
anonymous edits.

Cheers

Toby