Due to recent unfortunate events, there was concern among the community that the previous host of the Bitcoin Wiki might no longer be able to maintain this important community resource. As of today, the Bitcoin Wiki is under the protection of the forum. The wiki’s existing policies and community will continue (separately from this forum’s community), but the forum will be providing hosting and related technical services. The wiki is now hosted on a dedicated VM, so software changes will hopefully now be easier and more frequent. In my opinion, the Wiki’s quality has declined over the last couple of years due to a number of mostly technical problems which I hope can be fixed eventually.
Security ImprovementsThe new forum has been updated to the latest version of MediaWiki + extensions, with a custom SELinux confinement policy for Mediawiki, bitcoind and the CryptoPayment processor. Furthermore, a part-time sysadmin has been hired by the forum to be responsible for maintaining long-term security and maintenance of the Wiki. reCAPTCHA is now used only for account creation, merely to slow down bot-driven account creation.
Automated Anti-SpamCryptoPayment is a MediaWiki extension to limit spam by requiring a small one-time Bitcoin payment before a user is allowed to edit or create pages. While the payment is deliberately small for a normal user, it presents a barrier to persistent spammers. Formerly known as BitcoinPayment, CryptoPayment no longer relies upon MtGox as the payment backend. It now uses a Node.js backend which interfaces with bitcoind. The plan is to rewrite the plugin and backend to be high-quality code and then to release it as open source so other wikis can benefit from this very effective anti-spam mechanism.
CryptoPayment fees have been reduced from their previous level.
Requiring payment for
every user is certainly non-optimal. It prevents exactly the kind of “drive-by contributions” that wikis are great for. In the future, CryptoPayment might be improved by allowing users from “high-reputation” IP addresses to join without paying a fee. If you have any other ideas for improving the anti-spam system while making contributions easy, let us know.
dump.bitcoin.itdump.bitcoin.it will soon be restored. Going forward there will be weekly dumps in XML for the public to download.
Configuration CleanupSome Templates are currently not fixed in non-English languages to correspond with the s/BitcoinPayment/CryptoPayment/ replacement that is
currently described in English. If you are fluent in the other languages supported by the Wiki, please fix any pages you can or talk to the lead Wiki moderators nanotube and SomeoneWeird if you have text for a non-English Template that you are unable to edit.
Additionally, other pages such as the Login dialog need to be fixed to display the CryptoPayment notice in a similar manner to how it was presented with the previous Wiki. Do you notice anything else that needs to be fixed?
Bitcoin Wiki Discussion and SupportThis new sub-board is the best place to discuss the Wiki. We would be very interested to hear if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions to further improve the Wiki.
You can alternatively find people in
Freenode channel #bitcoin-wiki.
Note that I am not personally administrating the Wiki, and you should not contact me about Wiki problems (other than hosting).
