Re: Wiki vandalism and performance 🖋

[Jeremy Bicha]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Benjamin Kerensa <bkerensa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> You have a verified user group (Mozilla's equivalent of Ubuntu Members) who are trusted and then a public group which has limited permissions.
>
> Ubuntu should get away from MoinMoin as soon as it can and burn it down :) no big projects use it for good reason

Ironically, both of Ubuntu's (historically) major upstreams still use
Moin and I assume they are why Ubuntu's wiki started with Moin too.

GNOME moved to a "verified user group" as the only ones allowed to edit:
https://wiki.gnome.org/TrustedEditorGroup

I was surprised that it looks like Debian's wiki manages to be
spam-free and yet still open.
I looked at https://wiki.debian.org/RecentChanges (it's also linked
from their front page).

How bad was Ubuntu's wiki spam really?

I looked at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecentChanges?max_days=90 and
sure, there was some spam on May 6 but it was reverted within a few
hours. I don't have all the info but I'm getting the suspicion that
disabling wiki edit access was an over-reaction to that incident. My
theory is if we just had some people watching RecentChanges, the spam
could be kept under control. I understand that's not a job for
Canonical System Administrators but volunteers.

So here's one concrete easy to implement idea: I can't remember ever
using moin's RecentChanges page before today (maybe I wasn't fully
aware it existed). If we want more people checking RecentChanges, why
not add a link to the header or the footer of every page of the wiki?

And an occasional Planet blog post talking about how it important it
is to keep spam off the wiki and how to revert spam.

Launchpad gets occasional spam and perhaps some other limited
malicious activity but I've not heard any one suggest that it be
disabled for use by the general public.

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha