AnneW's world

Less than three weeks ago, at the WebWorld2011 sprint, we decided that we should open editing to all, no longer requiring registration.  During that time there has been an increase of spam, but we had a few genuine edits from people who were not logged in, and on that basis we decided that we would simply deal with the spam and keep editing open.  Yuri Chornoivan has taken the brunt of it, because much of it arrives during the night in my time-zone.  Last night, though, the situation took a turn for the worse.

Previous to that, we were getting registrations that posted pages with external links.  They were a nuisance, but easily spotted, and in numbers we could handle.  The last 24 hours has brought a threefold increase, and of a very different kind.  These are all from unregistered users, and consist of content of existing pages being deleted and inanities inserted.  This moves into an entirely different league, and is intolerable.  I have therefore requested that the sysadmins close editing again.

To those of you who used unregistered editing to add useful information, I thank you, and hope you will continue to add your wisdom.  Registering is still a fairly open process.  You do not have to wait for a confirmation email, or even to give an email address, though we do recommend that you do, as there are advantages such as allowing us to re-set your password if needed.  (Your email address is not visible to other users, at any point.)

I’m sad that we have to take this step, but if any of you read Mediawiki mailing lists you will be aware that many wikis are suffering similarly.  I would like to think that we could open editing again at some future time.