Aral Balkan

Recently I've noticed a increase in the amount of spam on the What Is Flash wiki. Due to the way that particular wiki is set up, it would not be a problem for me to lock the Wiki from edits or require logins but that runs contrary to the "spirit of the Wiki". However, discussions such as the one on WhyWikiWorks don't take into consideration automated spam bots -- something that's hinted at on WikiWipeout.

It appears that What Is Flash is not the first Wiki to be hit by Wiki Spam (see this page on WakkaWiki, for example) and there is a page discussing Wiki Spam on Ward Cunningham's Wiki (the "mother wiki" since it was the first.) Of course, it is easier to spam What Is Flash since it uses my WysiwygWiki engine (which allows you to update the pages using a visual HTML editor instead of cyptic WikiCode.)

Apparently there *is* an anti-spam patch for WikkiTikkiTavi (which WysiwygWiki is based on) but I haven't tried it yet.

The question, of course, is will Wiki spam kill the Wiki as we know it? I believe that the answer is yes. Wikis will at least require registration/login (which works beautifully -- zero blog spam to date on this blog) or some other method of thwarting spam.

The Will spam kill the Wiki? article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.