Re: wiki.erights.org and anonymous edits

Hello Everyone,

I'm responsible for running the wiki, by the way.  Please continue to
direct all questions / problems to this mailing list, because there
are some other people that have the sysop privilege who may also be 
able to help you.


On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 08:37:59AM -0500, Kevin Reid wrote:

> * No anonymous editing will discourage that rare unknown-profound-and- 
> lazy contributor who *is* sufficiently valuable to make up for their  
> comparative rarity.

The stats from Toby suggest that such people are too rare to exist in
the e-lang community.

> * With anonymous editing, they just edit and we can block their  
> address and prohibit account creation from it. Without anonymous  
> editing, they create accounts (yes, there are spambots that do that)  
> and Wikipedia hides their IP address (from me, at least), so we can't  
> block anything but their throwaway account (which persists forever in  
> the wiki database).

This, for me, is also the major aggravation factor.  Even with logged-in
users, it would be convenient to have their IP addressed also logged.  I
suppose there are reasons why the MediaWiki authors did it this way.

It is probably fixable (it is software after all), but I don't have any
spare brainpower to try to fix that.  Actually, I don't have much spare
brainpower for much of anything at this point.  More of this in my next
email.

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I looked at the changes proposed by Toby for ConfirmEdit.php (part of
reCaptcha) and they seem reasonable.  If there is some concensus that 
this is a good idea, I can implement that easily enough.  

As Kevin mentions above, however, the last thing we want to do is to
drive the people running the spambots to creating more accounts again. 
I haven't yet cleaned out the last giant batch of spambot accounts...
MediaWiki isn't designed to make that sort of thing easy.  There are
extensions which can merge accounts, but IIRC you have to do them 
one-by-one, and it wasn't clear how exactly I'd be scripting that. 
Again, not enough spare brainpower.

James