I think Anatoly and Larry are on to something here, but let me rephrase and add some of my opinions:
* A feature that lists "recent changes by user/IP" would speed up damage recovery immensly. Especially combined with:
* A feature with one button on each page displayed to an "old hand" that says "Revert to previous version". When pushed, it will do just that.
* No karmapoints should be implemented. This invariably leads to pointless "who has the longest" comparisons, and will attract people interested in such competitions.
My suggestion is instead: There should be exactly three discreete states for a user to be in: "Casual", "Old hand" and "Admin". No difference should be visible within theese categories, for the above reason. -"Casual" is simply anyone not in the other categories. "Old hand" is a tried and tested user who logged on of course. -"Old hand" status could be given when someone has commited pages for 30% of the days a given 30 day period, thus proving to be a bit more persistent than casual in editing. The ONE thing an "Old hand" can do that a "casual" cannot is edit the restricted pages (in essance the home page). -"Admin" status is reserved for the people owning the actual hardware the wiki is on. Nost people can accept that they have _da_powa_, and as long as they cannot hand it out willy nilly (thus creating an elite) it should be safe. There are TWO things that an "admin" can do: 1) demote an "Old hand" to "Casual". 2) Temporarily block an IP.
* No "hide from beginner" tendencies please. That is slightly offensive to those who actually read up on how to behave on the wiki before starting. Besides, security by obscurity is bad no matter how one looks at it :-)
If we proceed in this way (or something like it) we should have easy recovery of pages that has been vandalized, and also a mechanism of protecting our home page from defacing. This should empower honest users and make serious damage very hard to do unless one is prepared to put in serious work first.
Just my thoughts :-)
/Anders Törlind