A wiki moderator's hapless rant about user contributions

[NotATether]

This isn't in the Bitcoin Wiki subboard, because barely anyone seems to read or comment there. Mods, please bear with me.

The Bitcoin Wiki is a great place. It is one of the important parts of ancient Bitcoin history, its topics are very authoritative, and it boasts contributions from a large number of prominent figures in the Bitcoin community.

Lately though, it feels like it's becoming a dumping ground for spammers. There is barely anyone making genuine contributions to pages anymore.

This is my moderation queue, after removing about 10 null edits ("edits" where people just click "Submit" without changing the page text)



As you can see, the submission quality is atrocious. Almost my entire time moderating is spent rejecting edits which are actually just people begging for BTC or posting their addresses.

For the past few weeks, I have been using Grok Bot to help me automate restoration of the Wiki, and it has done quite a good job at that. Although sometimes it screws up, and I have to clean up after its mess, but at least it's trying to help.

Most of the humans submitting edits are more interested in spamming though, even though there is very little upside for them in doing so.

What surprises me most is the volume of spam though, considering that you have to be manually whitelisted for editing privileges. Although it's possible that these are just regular users' edits which get automatically sent to the moderation queue.

I have gotten exactly zero (0) requests at my email or anywhere else from people to whitelist their accounts. So if you're wondering where all the good contributors are, there's your answer. I think there are only a very few active users left.

Theymos has done a lot of good work in keeping the Wiki up for so long, even when there were barely any contributions to it. It honestly could've ended up archived like the new forum software. But these "editors" mostly aren't doing any good. So I think regular edits need to skip the moderation queue and be prevented outright until they are whitelisted for editing.

This is thankless work, but I'm proud of doing it, because in doing so I become part of Bitcoin history. I just wanted to rant about the current state of it.

/end rant

[theymos]

Thanks a lot for handling all of that spam!

If any veteran forum members reading this would like to help NotATether out with the spam by being a Permittor on the wiki, PM me.

I'm very reluctant to go back to the old method where you had to be manually approved before even being allowed to submit an edit for moderation because:
 - That really kills activity. The wiki would sometimes go months with zero edits.
 - If you can't see any proposed edits, how are you supposed to know if someone should be whitelisted, anyway? You just have to judge it based on the tone of their request, which is not a good method, especially in the age of AI.

[Stalker22]

Im no expert on this, but since theymos already brought up the "age of AI," a logical question pops up: couldnt AI be used as a first line of defense to screen these submissions and weed out the obvious spam?  From what I can tell, most of these junk edits would not even clear a basic filter, which would cut down the moderators' workload big time...

[joker_josue]

~~

I have to apologize to NotATether for not helping them.
Also to theymos for not contributing as I had said I would. 

NotATether, maybe we both need to organize ourselves to try and improve our contribution (speaking more for myself, perhaps).

Where do you think I can help?
If you'd like, we can take this conversation to the Wiki's board.