On Wed, 24 Nov 2010, Tech Geek wrote: > Can't you restore the mediawiki database to the date just before the > vandalization happened? I guess this assumes that any legitimate edits that > were made during the period when the vandalization took place will get lost > too.
Based on my own brief experience with MediaWiki, in which I had thought I had secured the wiki against non-user edits (entirely my mistake), I'd say that this is a needed feature. Because, yes, there are bots out there that like nothing better than to deface wikis. Perhaps it is a misguided attempt to boost search engine rankings. Or maybe they're just sent on their way by sociopathic kids who maybe have a little bit of talent but no constructive way to express it and no hope of achieving it. I don't know. And frankly, for our purposes here, I don't care because whatever the real underlying problem here is, we aren't solving it today. MediaWiki's attitude towards any attempt to secure a wiki is that this is contrary to the philosophy of a wiki, that if you want security, you're probably using the wrong software. This reposes a lot of trust in denizens of what for years we've been calling the "big bad Internet," what for years we've been constructing packet filters to protect ourselves from, what for years we've been trying to filter spam from, what for years we've been trying not to be fooled into phishing attacks on, etc. I'm not a sociologist, but I'm guessing that even if the twerps who deface wikis weren't born that way, even if broader society didn't make them that way, the Internet has. In short, MediaWiki's philosophy towards security is, in the world as we now find it or have made it, naive. And we need a way to repair the damage. Because without that, I can't even conceive of opening up my site (either the Drupal CMS or the wiki) to anonymous edits or to uninvited user registrations. Much as I'd like to. -- David Benfell <benf...@parts-unknown.org> http://www.parts-unknown.org/
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