[OSM-talk] Re: privacy policy

[Russ Phillips]

On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 18:09 +0100, Martyn Welch wrote:

> > > > I like to have the possibility to edit data without to have to create
> > > > an account first. I don't care whether the IP address is used in this
> > > > case (as wikipedia does) or not.
> > >
> > > I *really* don't think that this is a good idea and am supprised that it
> > > works so well for wikipedia.
> >
> > Well this is the point is it does work for Wikipedia, 
> 
> Which I feel is the exception that proves the rule. I can't think of another 
> project that does allow complete anonymous access.

I personally think that it works for Wikipedia because there are so many
visitors. I imagine spam gets spotted & removed very quickly. It's even
possible that spam bots ignore it *because* they don't expect spam to
stay there for very long.

On the other hand, the LUG Radio wiki [1] has nowhere near as many
users, doesn't require login to edit, and suffers from massive spam. Do
a search for "meal children" (no quotes) and you'll find lots of spam
edits with "Excuse for my post but I do not have money to buy meal to my
children. Forgive me please." at the start.

It's a numbers game, and I very much doubt we have the numbers.
Wikipedia has 970 administrators and 1,873,123 registered user accounts.
I doubt we have anything like those sorts of numbers, which means we
have far fewer people to fight the same number of spammers.

Russ

[1] http://wiki.lugradio.org/