2007@gmask.com wrote:
This is what is happening to me as well.. but the inserted words are allways at the beginning of the page which gives me hope in blocking these types of bot edits with a regex.
I was thinking that this could be checked against a dictionary. If the first "word" inserted is not in the dictionary (for the page's language), require the user to confirm the save. A bot won't confirm.
This would have to be smart enough to skip wikitext (e.g. don't worry about "[[Image:"). Similarly, it would choke on obscure acronyms, but a real person would not likely complain too much.
This could be a hook into the "save" code and only need check for the first word. However, the bot writer can switch to posting at the end of the article... Possibly, a scan of the entire page to reject exceptionally bad spelling might suffice, but will put off some contributers (and annoy US vs Canadian vs British spellers if the bad spelling algorithm isn't smart enough to think honour vs honor isn't that bad).
Mike