[gambit-list] Wiki vandalism

Harold Ancell hga at ancell-ent.com
Sat Oct 13 11:32:55 EDT 2007


At 09:40 AM 10/13/2007, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

>On Oct 13, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
>
>> Anyone have a > suggestion on how to deal with this?
>
>Require a login, confirmed by email, to edit content?

That will hinder people who want to help, especially since MediaWiki
isn't so good about maintaining sessions or remembering users.

If you're willing to wait up to a day, I check the site every
morning and will revert vandalism (don't have authority to delete
pages, though), and would be happy to fight this clown for a week
or so to see if he gives up.

It looks like the same person from a PRC address started the
vandalism on the Gambit Wiki on the same day as he hit the
Scheme Punks (ERR5RS among other things) Wiki, same style and
about the same number of edits.

Scheme Punks then got spammed (new pages) by perhaps the same
person (Chinese language, I think (not Japanese or Korean))
and the administrator instituted a system where new pages can
only be created by logged in and pre-authorized users (this
works for the ERR5RS effort, might not be so good for Gambit).

And it's still suffering from the random psuedo-word insertion
vandalism as of today (plus I just noticed some link spam).

And, yeah, some people just revel in vandalism.  Very recent
statistics seem to show that the psychic payoff for participating
in the Wikipedia community hit a tipping point in February, and
I think at least a third of that is vandals masquerading as Wiki-
lawyer "deletionists" who just enjoy destroying other people's
work.  Wikipedia is also constantly vandalized in this general
sort of way, but what has prompted someone to attack seriously
obscure Scheme sites is open to question.  Given how automated
attacks were half a decade ago, I'd guess just random port-80
"do I see a MediaWiki?" scanning.

Which implies this may be a robot rather than someone we can
deter with reverts....

                                        - Harold




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