On 31 May 2005, at 11:41, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Quoting Ben Metcalfe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/
Such vandalism, as you can appreciate, is our biggest concern on this
front. But will keep you all informed.
I'm not sure vandalism should be *too* much of a concern - wikis
are becoming
the norm in developer communities. For example, see the Java.net
community
wiki at:
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Main/WebHome
My two cents is that the benefits of wikis in community building
outweight the
disadvantages.
Here are a few notes from personal experience...
Unfortunately, Wikis by their nature are extraordinarily easy to
spam. It basically comes down to critical mass - if a wiki has an
active community that is constantly on the lookout for vandalism, the
problem can be dealt with. If a wiki is only used occasionally it's
very easy for it to be overwhelmed with spam, which puts people off
from contributing / cleaning up and hence leads to more spam. Weeding
a garden makes a surprisingly good analogy.
There are plenty of technical measures that can be taken to help
reduce wiki spam - a few obvious ones are rejecting (or moderating)
changes that introduce more than one or two links to external sites,
rel="nofollow" on links (although I haven't seen much evidence that
this discourages spammers) and CAPTCHA tests. Surprisingly, to my
knowledge few of the open source wiki packages have made much effort
to integrate spam prevention features yet.
At the end of the day though it's all about activity - and it's hard
to tell how active a wiki will be until it has been set up!
Cheers,
Simon Willison
http://simon.incutio.com/
