Here's an approach I haven't seen described yet: have a wiki-editing
rank, but base your privilage of editing on your history of making
acceptible edits.  That is, you increase in rank by making good edits,
and you decrease (dramatically) in rank by spamming.  Has anyone heard
of such a system?

Here's a straw man system just to give you the idea.  There is a lot of
tweaking that is possible.

There are three ranks:

	RandomSchmoe.  Anyone off the net.  You do not even need to log in.
	
	Editor.  Someone who is allowed to edit pages, due to a history of
	acceptible edits.
	
	Moderator.  Someone who has been long been a good citizen, and can
	start allowing others into the community or kicking others out.

As a Random Schmoe, you can view all you want.  If you edit a page, then
your proposed edit goes into a queue for moderation.  Whenever you queue
a proposed edit, you can create an account if you want; or, you can
leave it as an anonymous edit if you prefer.  (This latter is good for
stupid spelling fixes, or small corrections by outside people who really
have no plan to return to our wiki.  I want to avoid red tape as much as
possible!)   If a Moderator approves 1 proposed edit of yours, then you
become an Editor.

If you log in and you are an editor, then you can edit all the pages you
like.  If you make at least 10 edits, and you are in the community at
least 1 month, then you automatically become a Moderator.  If you make
an unacceptible edit, then 2 moderators may collude to remove your
editing privilages.  You can also approve queued edits that schmoes have
made, but the schmoe will remain a schmoe.

If you are a Moderator, then you are a keeper of the gates of the
community.  You can elevate a schmoe to an editor by pointing to any
proposed edit that you approve of.  If an editor beat you to it, you can
re-approve (including one that an editor has already approved 


This is a basic scheme.  To fancy it up, there could be multiple levels,
each with a *rate* of editing that is allowed.  So editor-10 can make 10
edits per day, and editor-100 can make 100.  You have to make 100 total
edits before attaining editor-100.  Something like that.  Also, rank
should probably degrade over time if you don't do anything on the wiki. 
I want the ranks to represent the *active* community.  Also, size of
edits should matter; I'm just talking about number of edits, to simplify
the discussion.

I haven't said exactly how proposed edits are *rejected* when they are
bad.  We need a mechanism for that, and there are many ways to do it. 
You might simply leave things on a queue for 5 days.  You might let
moderators whack edits immediately, or two editors to get rid of one. 
Or you might let anyone get rid of a proposed edit, but the edit gets
logged anyway.  I hope the specific approach doesn't matter: there won't
be many bots attacking a wiki of this kind.

The general principles of this approach are:

	1. Spambots don't work.
	
	2. To abuse the system, you have to precede the abuse by an
approximately equal amount of good deeds.
	
	3. Goodness vs. abuse is decided by active members of the community.
	
	4. The red tape stays out of the way for two important operations:
viewing, and tiny fixes.
	
	5. Moderators are mostly used to flag *bad* edits, not good ones,
because good edits are far more common.  (With the notable exception of
edits by complete schmoes, where a moderator must flag the edit as
good.)
	
	
The main drawback is that there needs to be a little bit of moderation
to raise people to Editor.  Given our problems with BFAV
non-participation, this might be a problem.  However, wiki moderation
seems likely to be very easy compared to BFAV bug evaluation.  Further,
I hope that most edits are done by repeat editors; moderators only get
involved in the first edit that people do, and thus I hope not a lot of
moderation is needed.


-Lex