goran.krampe at bluefish.se <goran.krampe at bluefish.se> wrote:

> Hi folks!
> 
> Frank Caggiano <frank at crystal-objects.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > A few pages on the Swiki got hit. I fixed all but this one
> > http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1983
> > 
> > it's locked.  Could  someone in the know unlock and fix it.
> 
> Perhaps it is time to turn the Swiki readonly and with a 
> "semi private"
> password distributed on this list. I tend to think so.

One of the things that drew me into the Squeak community was the open nature of the Swiki.

While locking down the Swiki prevents bad people from vandalising the wiki, it also carries a hefty price tag: people have to jump through hoops to add new content or correct existing content. While existing members of the community might have enough invested in our community to willingly pay that price, it raises the bar on entry to our community, and that, I feel, is a very high price. Perhaps too high.

Whenever I find vandalised pages, I fix them. They typically occur in a large batch, so they're easy to find - they all have the same IP, so I can just scroll down the RecentChanges & fix them as I go. It doesn't take a long time to fix each page, so even a bix defacement doesn't take very long (~10 minutes) to fix.

These bot-driven defacements are EASY to fix(*). Don't lock down the Swiki just for these. Yes, it's annoying. It's like someone throwing garbage on your lawn just after you've cleaned it. But I don't think that the price is worth what little we get from it.

(*) What's not easy to fix is small, subtle alterations of what other people have said, or small deliberate errors in documentation, scattered here and there over time. That requires actual reading and reviewing of pages.

Having said that, MediaWiki have a very nifty feature where admins can ban IPs or even IP ranges for limited periods of time. (I don't know what the upper limit is: the field is a text field, so presumably you could even specify "10 years".)

frank


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