Bitcoin Wiki: Looking for administrators (step 1/2)

[Stephen Gornick]

Ha, we are being blackmailed.  The latest spams read:


"To encourage less bulk wiki article creation, please send bitcoins to [...]"

Of course, when you reward something you get more of it, so please nobody honor this blackmail request.

But this is a problem that does not seem to be going away on its own.

And certainly this wasn't created just for the Bitcoin.it wiki.  I wonder how many other wiki admins are pulling their hair out (and blaming Bitcoin instead of realizing that wikis are a collaboration system vulnerable to this type of automated attack).

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[rjk]

Ha, we are being blackmailed.  The latest spams read:


"To encourage less bulk wiki article creation, please send bitcoins to [...]"

Those fuckers.

[casascius]

I am willing to administer the wiki on an ad-hoc basis, similar to how I do now.  In other words, I am unlikely to schedule time to do things on it, but will fix things on sight as I already do.  A brief review of my edit history will show that I regularly blank spam pages... if I had admin privileges, I'd be deleting them instead.

If that qualifies me to be an admin, the privilege would certainly not be abused.  I suppose there are numerous other activities that go into running a wiki such as contributing and maintaining articles, but these don't require being an admin and are things I would continue to do at the same pace as always.

[Stephen Gornick]

if I had admin privileges, I'd be deleting them instead.

Is there any other method that can help to stop this wiki spam bot menace?

I know blogging commenting systems have a scoring tool to automatically quarantine spam-like or otherwise suspicious posts,

Looking at MediaWiki, they suggest:

 - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam

[Graet]

It would be nice if the wiki contents could be kept to facts and away from opinion.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin is a prime example one "respected" Bitcoin developer continuously put his opinion in and expects it to be taken as fact. Led to many stupid unnecesary for Bitcoin or Litecoin arguments in the forums and IRC.
https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Litecoin&action=history

For a few months now I have been keeping an eye on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools . People start a pool and post there but when it fails forget to remove. So after verifying pools don't exist anymore I have been marking them as inactive, someone else has then been deleting them.
be handy if people that post check back and keep their posts up to date from time to time

[Bitcoin Oz]

Perhaps to become a user and post on the wiki you could send a bitcent and provide a return address for it to come back ?

Its not the best solution but its something.

[barbarousrelic]

I would like to volunteer to help moderate the wiki and clean up the spam.

My login is "barbarousrelic"

My motivation is to have a central place people can go to get all their Bitcoin questions answered, for the betterment of the Bitcoin community.

[Stephen Gornick]

I'm having a case of deja vu, .. right now I'm adding to an article something I swear I added several months ago.  I checked the article's history and it doesn't show the edit I believe I made previously. This has happened now for at least several articles.

When adding details for an exchange, those details sometimes get replicated to other pages like the Buying bitcoins, Selling bitcoins, and Trade page.  For this specific entry (Bit-Pay), I remember doing a search on the Selling bitcoins page after the update to see if it was the only entry to list Mexico (MXN).  Today the entry for them did not already show this edit, so I'm completely baffled.

I know the site had technical errors (mysql errors) a couple months ago. It almost seems like the DB was restored from a point-in-time backup and thus some updates since that backup became lost.  That's just speculation though.

This wiki could really use some better administration though.

Some pending issues:  There still are many links that still go to the old forum structure (bitcoin.org/smf or forum.bitcoin.org), which could be identified and manually edited even.  There are a ton of spam bot articles.  Most have been renamed, but because delete requires admin, they remain eyesores.

There is a growing amount of editing / updating needed as well.  The "securing your wallet" article, for instance, is horrible, and hasn't been tweaked now that wallet encryption allows for it to be vastly improved.  And some articles have incorrect information.

The wiki needs someone to champion it.

[allten]

I would like to be help on wiki.
Not the best writer, but I'm very determined to keep to the facts and clarify opinions are only opinions.
Can help with the Spanish version too.

[giszmo]

I am willing to administer the wiki on an ad-hoc basis, similar to how I do now.  In other words, I am unlikely to schedule time to do things on it, but will fix things on sight as I already do.  A brief review of my edit history will show that I regularly blank spam pages... if I had admin privileges, I'd be deleting them instead.

If that qualifies me to be an admin, the privilege would certainly not be abused.  I suppose there are numerous other activities that go into running a wiki such as contributing and maintaining articles, but these don't require being an admin and are things I would continue to do at the same pace as always.

These could be my words.

Ok so I still see dire need for work in the wiki as expressed in my new thread on the subject and see only 4 (the old) admins. Did this thread here not result in new admins?

If you want me on board, I would be honored and try my best to use the power sensitively. "Sensitively" would most likely mean that I would not take away LukeJr's toy (although I would secretly applaud if anybody else did) and I would not delete articles in a rush but initialize deletion-discussions if there is any doubt about deleting something.

Please see my edits for reference.

[Stephen Gornick]

For some reason in Chrome the CSS is hozed, displaying a blue background.

I didn't notice it at first and it seemed like it all of a sudden started occurring after I had done some spam article deletions, but I can't see anything that I would have done that would have touched the CSS so it must have been a coincidence.

But there's a problem yet so I'm not sure how to proceed.

[Stephen Gornick]

For some reason in Chrome the CSS is hozed, displaying a blue background.

Interesting ... it is a bug in Chrome, apparently, fixed in Chrome v19.

 - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113711


I'm on 18 but didn't just do any update.  Bizarre.

[Stephen Gornick]

Interesting ... it is a bug in Chrome, apparently, fixed in Chrome v19.

Man that looks horrible though.  Can anyone else confirm this issue?

I wonder if simply removing the blue background from the CSS for now would be better than trying to limp through.  It really looks like the site was hacked or something, it just looks bad.

[Stephen Gornick]

Man that looks horrible though.  Can anyone else confirm this issue?

I wonder if simply removing the blue background from the CSS for now would be better than trying to limp through.  It really looks like the site was hacked or something, it just looks bad.

I see where the problem occurs.  I had accidentally set my zoom at 90%.  With that setting the articles are nearly unreadable due to the CSS artifact.  At 100%, the problem goes away.

[dree12]

Hello,

I would like to apply for adminship on the Bitcoin wiki. Although my involvement in it has been minimal so far, I am beginning to get irritated at the spam present there, and would volunteer some of my time to help clean it up. Unlike certain people, I have no motivation to use any administrator powers for harm. Due to some wikipedia editing experience, the actions I have done are in general extremely neutral. I also have prior experience with administrating a mediawiki wiki.

My username is "Dree12". Thank you for considering my request.

[ripper234]

I'd like to apply for wiki admin rights.
Who should I talk to?