I have been trying to run a mediawiki based wiki on my main site for a while now (alper.nl/wiki) and the general results have been pretty awesome.
The wiki is currently down which is not too bad because activities on my part had taken a lull anyway. I’m too busy graduating right now.
The problem lately was that my edits have been greatly outnumbered by edits committed by spammers. Reverting 10-20 pages every week and blocking a handful of users gets old real fast.
The same is happening right now to the Reboot wiki. It is a great place for the participants of Reboot8 to gather and collaborate but at the moment most anyone can do is revert the spammed pages.
There does not seem to be a standard out of the box solution to prevent spam on a wiki. I have looked and tried some tentative solutions. I think blacklisting is too much of a hassle as to provide an answer.
Making edits restricted to registered users does not help, because spammers are perfectly capable of registering. Moderation of new users by admins would be a leap in preventing spam.
Until spam prevention techniques such as the one described above are implemented in a default mediawiki install and work without much hassle, running a wiki on a public server is a downhill battle against spammers.
Gettings some attention to this would help. Dig it.
