[okfn-discuss] Open Knowledge Foundation wiki

Tue Mar 11 15:11:42 UTC 2014

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014, at 11:16, Michael Bauer wrote:
> Tom,
> 
> Agree with you there. Found editing very annoying.
> 
> Do you know who maintains the Wiki right now?

Hi Tom, Michael, and the rest of the list,

Here's the deal: this time last year, our wiki was absolutely flooded
with spam, to an extent that might seem hard to believe. At its peak, we
received hundreds of user registrations every day, and spam pages
outnumbered real content on the wiki by a factor of 10 to 1.

The Foundation has extremely limited system administrator resource, so
we haven't been able to dedicate as much time or effort as we'd like to
keeping the wiki clean and easy to contribute to. Luckily for us, we
have a fantastic community, including such people as Harry Wood[1] and
Chris Sakkas[2], both of whom have spent countless hours of their own
time battling spam on the wiki and advising the system administrators on
how best to configure the wiki to prevent spam.

The current configuration of the wiki is primarily the result of Joel's
implementation of Harry's advice. While we still get some spam user
registrations[3] things have in general calmed down and the wiki is once
again a reasonably useful space for the community.

Obviously, there's substantial room for improvement. One problem is that
the spam controls are somewhat draconian and get in the way of people
trying to make simple edits to the wiki. If anyone has experience
administering a mediawiki installation and wants to volunteer to help
sort this out, while being aware that we *do not* want to naively roll
back the spam protections currently in place, then please let me know
and we can make sure you have the appropriate access.

Best,
Nick

[1]: http://wiki.okfn.org/User:Harry_Wood
[2]: http://wiki.okfn.org/User:Sanglorian
[3]:
http://wiki.okfn.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=500&days=30

-- 
Nick Stenning
Technical Director, Open Knowledge Foundation