CC Public Wiki:Fighting spam

Problem: there is way too much spam on this wiki.

There are 15k+ pages, with an estimated spam ratio between 70% and 97%.

This is a list of recommendations started by guaka (talk).

Recommendations

Some recommendations / ideas for fighting spam on this wiki.

The most urgent ones are in a bold typeface.

social

set up coordinated team

• give trusted users sysop rights to help fighting spam (by blocking and deleting)
• give more trusted people bureaucrat rights to promote trusted users to sysops
• invite people to join through IRC, social media, mailing lists

• keeping eye on:
  • Special:ActiveUsers
  • Special:Recentchanges

• set goals
  • e.g. no new spam
    • block all new spammers and remove all their contributions retrospectively
  • remove 200 spam pages per day

structural

• categorize all non-spam uncategorized pages

technical

• faster server (for faster manual spam removal)

• better captcha
  • pet finder seems to work fairly well

• run a bot to clean up existing spam
  • based on picking user names
  • based on keywords in titles and/or articles