- Not allowing people to add links to external URLs to pages without
first logging in.
So, they log in, which doesn't solve anything. 21c3.ccc.de and is-root.de were hit with more of this wikitikitavi spam today, and it all came from logged in users. All this does is prevent people seeing the spammer's IP, making it harder to block them on other languages or other projects, and making it harder to find all the spam from one user when they change usernames more easily than they change IPs.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of spam on inactive _Wikipedias_ is from unloggedin users. To write a spambot that registers and logs in at multiple inactive Wikipedias is more trouble. It won't solve isolated incidents, of course.
But it would hopefully act as a deterrent, removing so many inactive WPs as sitting ducks.
- Not allowing people to add #REDIRECT ... to pages without first
logging in. If they tried to, they'd get a "preview" window and a warning message.
Although redirects within a wiki are a little harder for non-admins to revert than normal vandalism, I don't think this problem is common enough to warrant more confusion to unregistered users. The lack of ability to move pages already causes problems. Wikimedia already disables cross-wiki and special page redirects, so I don't think we need more restrictions in this area.
I guess that's true. The only real problems have been people who are vandalising rather than spamming, such as redirecting [[Main Page]] to, say, [[Dsapiodfpioipoasdf]]. However, people who do this log in more often, and use the pagemove function instead. So far, Afar god (hit one Wiki), Willy on Wheels (hit 3 wikis so far), and a few other less memorable users (Afar god was actually a bit funny, and Willy on Wheels hit multiple Wikis).
- Not allowing people to replace, say, 30kb of text with two words,
without first logging in. If they tried to, they'd get a warning message and woudln't be able to submit it.
Wouldn't this make it harder to maintain these small wikis? They have no admins, so deleting a page means blanking it or putting {{delete}} on it for the benefit of some future admin. How can anyone clear up junk and copyvios if they can't easily (ie - without logging in) blank a page? Expecting people to log in on small wikis is more of a demand than expecting them to do so on a large one, since there is less benefit. If all you ever want to do is blank one page there, why make an account? And if you have an account, you probably don't use it often enough to stay logged in.
Although that's certainly true... hmm... the only possible solution to the issues you raise would be to whitelist certain IP ranges, which although feasible is probably not something that anybody would agree with for whatever reasons.
- Not allowing ANYBODY to have one or more external URLs as the sole
contents of a page, except perhaps stewards or admins
That would be so easy to get round that it would be pointless, and perhaps even damaging. If I see a page full of URLs, it's very quick to recognise it as spam. If we force the spammers to be clever and start mixing content with the spam, it's going to be harder to spot, especially if that content is in a language you don't know.
True...
- Not allowing anybody to add words like "motherf*cker", "c*nt",
"as*hole", "sh*t", that-medicine-that-starts-with-v, that-medicine-that-starts-with-c (including replacing the "a" with an @ sign), "pha ... ceu ... cals", or strings such as "is gay", "is so gay", etc. While allowing such things may be needed on larger Wikipedias, on _inactive_ Wikipedias it would prevent probably 50% of vandalism.
I think there is a setting for this in MediaWiki already, but it's only editable by developers. You need to be very careful about what goes in it though. Blocking "that-medicine-that-starts-with-c" will prevent anyone writing about socialism (which was rather a problem for socialism.wikicities.com) :)
See-eye-a-ell-eye-ess is related to _socialism_?? Not sure that medicine is widely used in the UK, but here it's used as a medicine for... well... that problem that some middle-aged guys have that would set off some spam filters if I referred to it by name. I have gotten plenty of spam about it, and so have Wikis. The pha ... ceu ... cals, however, needs to be added to that list if it does indeed exist -- lots of spam seems to include that word.
If the wikis are really inactive, wouldn't a system where every edit must be approved, or at least time-delayed, make more sense? Another option is to "retire" a wiki. It becomes non-editable, but has a button that allows anyone to relaunch it very quickly (perhaps with a captcha to prevent spam bots), with no knowledge needed, and no bureaucracy about new language edition policies. This could send a warning to the people monitoring inactive wikis.
It solves many of the problems caused by inactive WPs:
- Vandalism, spamming.
Which of those do you find is the more common problem on inactive/small wikis?
Spamming, by far. Spamming is usually done by bots, vandalism is usually done by (presumably) teenagers with nothing better to do who think it's really funny to replace the contents of the Fijian mainpage with "haha poop is a funny word", or move all the pages on the Xhosa Wikipedia to "(subject) is so gay", or whatever.
- The second proposed solution to problem #1 is to _monitor_ inactive Wikis
The reliance on unrelated third party tools to monitor these makes it much harder. In my experience, feed readers can't be relied on. The ones I've tried do not catch all edits, and and will not scale to more than about 300 wikis. This is something that MediaWiki, or a tool made specifically for wiki monitoring, needs to do for itself.
This is unfortunately the truth. It would be nice if there were some feature that listed suspicious edits separately, so that I or you or someone else could revert them ASAP, and less-suspicious edits (such as copyvios or pages in the wrong language) could be reverted within about 2 days.
I used to browse the list of inactive Wikis every few hours, but it became so inconvenient that I do it perhaps twice or even once every day now. I really don't feel that pages in the wrong language or copyvios are hugely crucial to be reverted ASAP, but I do check my e-mail often enough that if I were to receive an e-mail every two hours with a list of suspicious edits, I could revert them immediately as nessecary.
Mark