I had to alter the MultimediaWiki permissions to disallow new user registrations. There was a curious case of vandalism that was suspected to be a bot which would register a new 6-character username and use that username once in order to either delete a large swath of text from a random wiki page or delete all the plus (+) symbols from a random wiki page. The latter vandalism could be far more damaging if left unnoticed. There might be better access control mechanisms but I wanted to cut this nuisance off quickly. I finally upgraded to the latest MediaWiki verison in the 1.6 line and am looking into a 1.9 upgrade as well. There are probably better controls in the latest line, though they are likely sparsely documented.
Every time something like this happens I always find myself wondering what the originators of the wiki concept were thinking in the first place. A wide open website where anyone can edit anything. And we’re supposed to just trust everyone to behave. At least there are trade-offs built in to the software that can be adjusted, as I did today. It just stuns me to realize how fragile the model is, how much more damage someone could do if they wanted, and what kind of measures that Wikipedia must have to take to thwart this on a larger scale.
I would say the money to begin with :P And the fact that it probably has many more users, many orders of magnitude more users..
Beside this made me thinking if I ever actually registered to MultimediaWiki… turns out I didn’t, probably because I never had the need to edit something… whenever you reopen registration, or if I ever have something to edit (asking you) I’ll see to comply.
Sysops like myself and Diego B. are supposed to be able to register people (the process is supposed to create a random password and email you). I will use your nickname and email address to test.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit has served me well to block wiki spam.
I’m sure it works great, but CAPTCHAs in Wikis really irritate me. And since I’m the principal editor of the MultimediaWiki, I would be severely irritated.
I agree that it would be irritating if you have to “solve” a CAPTCHA on every edit.
But you can set it up to only present a captcha when creating a new account, or when editing a page anonymously.
The on-account-creation thing would be a great idea if it really is just a bot attacking the Wiki. I’ll take this under consideration.