Zach Alexander wrote:

Does anyone know where Gabriel Wicke is? (User:Gwicke) I'm trying to contact him about wiki hosting (wikidev.net) and I haven't heard back.

(Maybe in the meantime someone can answer one of the questions I was asking him! Security: How hard is it to hack into and seriously/permanently damage a MediaWiki wiki? I.e. beyond just annoying vandalism. Are there extra steps one can take to minimize this risk? I ask because the wiki I would like to start might become a target.)

Zach

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MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

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My wiki *will* be a serious target for vandalism and worse once we get it up and running to the public, and so my choice of software was not taken lightly.

In the end, I decided that Wikipedia was so high-profile that they were already likely to have faced numerous hacking attempts. Between it being Open Source (so the security team I have access to can respond to threats) and it being frequently updated, I decided this was probably as safe as it gets; especially since a lot of other wiki-only wiki packages (i.e., not the content management ones) didn't really have much of an idea about what a user or edit blocking was. :)

Our main threat will be idiots trying to add illegal or dangerous content. At some point before we go public, the security team is going to have to write a tool that cleanly deletes whole entries that are illegal (instead of doing that by hand). I hope that could be contributed back to the project but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

So, I suppose that's a vote of confidence? :)

Hínandil