Although I find that wikis can be extremely useful they seem to have been adopted by a lot of organisations without any real thought of the implications. If email spam and blog comment spam wasn’t bad enough, having to contend with junk on wikis could become a full-time job for any wiki maintainers. I doubt if anyone will pay to have it done though :)

Yes, wiki spam is definitely a problem and ICANNWIKI currently gets spammed about 4 times per day.  If this grows, we will have to change our rules.  That pains me, however, because the beauty of the current system is that it allows such easy editing, with or without logging in.  Right now, it is more important to lower the barrier for legitimate users, especially those just learning how to use the system, than to raise the barrier to a few bad actors.

The spam we get today is all from people outside the industry putting up tons of links for drugs and the like.  In fact, they put the links up in an invisible way, hoping that we won’t notice and the presence of these links will improve their own search engine rankings.

I am happy to report that there have not been cases of people in the ICANN community “spamming” the site with offensive material or blatent advertisements.  Of course there will always be differences of opinion, but the wiki environment naturally tends towards a neutral point of view so over time the wiki may be the best place to look for material presented in a neutral point of view (NPOV).

I think the paid marshall notion is premature.  At this point it is easy enough to keep ICANNWIKI clean of spam and growing in a constructive manner, but if that changes, then my plan would be to ask for volunteers to oversee various areas.

I will be guest speaker on the Domain Masters webcast on Webmaster Radio today at (7pm E / 4pm P), and I will be mentioning the ICANNWiki and the participation at the ICANN Conference.

Author apologizes for fake Wikipedia Biography - USA Today

“I’m glad this aspect of it is over,” Seigenthaler, 78, said. But he expressed concern that “every biography on Wikipedia is going to be hit by this stuff - think what they’d do to
Tom DeLay and Hillary Clinton, to mention two. My fear is that we’re going to get government regulation of the Internet as a result.”

Wikis have to start implementing better security practices ... perhaps implement something similar to collaborative approval of edits ... Mike Nelson of ISOC introduced me to swarmsketch.com - an innovative way to do collaborative editing.

Security for public wikis is certainly a growing issue, but for most corporate and group applications, there is no reason to make a wiki open to the greater public.  I work with two separate organizations that maintain private wikis as a workspace where individuals can post material, mark up existing material, and agree on final versions, among many other apps, and I wonder if we’ll see more use of wikis as intra-organization tools.

And in other news, having engaged in the debate many times myself as to the veracity of data in public wikis, Nature Magazine just posted an article  citing that wikipedia’s public science entries were just about as accurate as Britannica.  Viva wikipedia!

True—Wikis are great in internal debates/discussions, my security concerns are for public wikis which can be spammed without any restrictions.

I must report that ICANN WIKI got a serious bout of spam in the past week.  It is almost all from the same source and is of the form of URL spam, it is plain to see in the recent changes view.  As a result, we’ve:

1) Made login required
2) Stopped accepting saves with