[Openstreetmap] making the wiki user-only

[Tom Carden]

ben at somethingmodern.com wrote:
> SteveC <steve at fractalus.com> wrote:
>>
>>To avoid this, does anyone have an objection to making the wiki user
>>only editable?
> 
> Yes. Down the road to the dark side, this is. I've had this debate many times,
> so I'll spare the details: By definition Wiki's are publically editable.
> 

Agreed, in principle.  But in practice, I don't think requiring (open, 
public) log-in for edits would stop anyone contributing.  OSM is a 
wiki-style map, and it requires log-in -- hadn't we better get our story 
straight?

I think that a by-definition-public wiki is only workable with 
significant numbers of users.  Or a better interface.  If someone can 
say "this has clearly been vandalised" and find the last good copy 
quickly, then it will work.  If they can't, it won't.  Thank goodness 
this was only 2 pages of vandalism and not the whole thing.

If it was done by a bot I'm not sure why it wasn't the whole thing... 
have we banned the IP by the way?

> A better solution -- which I'll happily implement -- is a sort of CAPTCHA. On
> my personal Wiki, I've implemented a simple "math problem" CAPTCHA that has
> dropped our preveious-frequent spam postings to nil:
> 
>     http://gimpert.com/wiki/wiki.cgi?action=edit&id=Sandbox
> 
> Note the "Are you human?" question at the bottom.
> 
> Want me to do this for the OSM Wiki? Do I have access to the PHP?
> 

That would be good.

Is this a good time to suggest that we generate a captcha image/applet 
from the OSM database and ask people to annotate some gps trails before 
they post? ;)

http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/001819.html

Tom.