MediaWiki/Spam

One of the bigger problems facing a public wiki is spam. We've used only a few techniques to prevent SPAM in this public wiki, but they've worked well for us.

Before preventing SPAM, you can prevent access, and that's the approach that we've employed so far. Using mw:Manual:$wgGroupPermissions we've disabled all privileges by default, and then allow read-only access to the wiki. We did use the mw:Extension:ConfirmAccount extension, but we've even turned that off and simply request users to contact a Sys Admin for an account -- making the process manual and personal. Additionally, we

1. Use the BadBehavior extension.
2. Protect the MainPage from editing

There are many more techniques that can be implemented. There are a few extensions bundled with a download version of MediaWiki; described in the mw:Manual:Combating_spam. And you can see the extensions used on the MediaWiki website itself MediaWiki.org such as

• mw:Extension:AbuseFilter
• mw:Extension:ConfirmEdit
• mw:Extension:ConfirmEdit#FancyCaptcha
• mw:Extension:AntiSpoof
• mw:Extension:SpamBlacklist (and the blacklist used for wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist)

Research

A paper on how Wikipedia combats spam, focusing on one particular bot: ClueBot NG.

As of July 2017, the "Revision Scoring as a Service" research initiative has become a full-fledged team at WMF. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Scoring_Platform_team

todo I should implement this service, or at least take a closer look at the code and what they're doing. See the Tech Talk and more info on the wikimedia blog

unsolicited bulk email

WikiMedia Foundation = the organization which runs various projects including Wikipedia.org