Spam protection for MediaWiki

Hi,

I noticed that the OWL-WG's wiki has little spam protection. The popularity of 
MediaWiki unfortunately has lead to a large number of well-adjusted spambots 
that will also create user accounts if necessary. Most do not do this, but if 
one of the smarter ones finds your site, it can mess up large parts of your 
pages pretty quickly (and large numbers of employed IPs/accounts and edits 
makes it hard to undo things automatically).

I recommend to use the ConfirmEdit extension [1] on all MediaWiki 
installations. It is quite trivial yet effective, and can be configured to 
only become active when new accounts are created, so normal editing is not 
impaired. We have used it on our wikis and it worked pretty well (also with 
anonymous edits allowed), certainly much better than content 
filters/blacklists (spambots, even if blocked from entering actual ads, tend 
to vandalise wikis in strange ways, probably due to bugs in their code).

-- Markus

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit

-- 
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362        fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
mak@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de        www  http://korrekt.org