Comment by hinkley
7 months ago
I’ve wanted to create a wiki for a hobby for a long time, but I don’t want to get stuck in spam and abuse reports, which just becomes more of a given with each passing year.
With a hobby wiki, eventual consistency is fine. I believe ghost bans and quarantine and some sort of invisible captcha would go a long way toward my goal, but it’s hard to find invisible captcha.
There was a research project long ago that used high resolution data from keyboards to determine who was typing. The idea was not to use the typing pattern as a password, but to flag suspicious activity. To have someone walk past that desk to see if Sally hurt her arm playing tennis this weekend of if Dave is fucking around on her computer while she’s in a meeting
That’s about the level I’m looking for. Assume everyone is a bot during a probationary period and put accounts into buckets of likely human, likely bot, and unknown.
What I’d have to work out though is temporary storage for candidate edits in a way they cannot fill up my database. A way to throttle them and throw some away if they hit a limit. Otherwise it’s still a DOS attack.
How does one graduate from probation, while being hellbanned / having your contribution quarantined? Since I'm certainly not wasting my time doing a second contribution so long as the first one isn't getting approved, it sounds like this would have to be a manual process or you'd lose out on new contributors that are seeing their work go to /dev/null and never returning
Do you believe what we are doing now is working? Because with the exception of places like this the internet sure looks pretty Dead to me.
You always have to show people their own edits. It's a common form of proofreading. But what's added and how often does matter. Misinformation is one thing. External links are potentially something much worse. I used to think SO had it figured out as far as mutual policing, but that's not working so well now either.
I'm not sure what e.g. showing one one's own change answers. Do you manually review submissions or how does get one out of this initial "put everyone in quarantine" state?
I'm also not sure what "we" are doing now that makes the web look dead to you. I receive no more email spam than ten years ago, less if anything, and I haven't seen any spam on the places that I frequent like HN, stackexchange, wikipedia, mastodon, signal, github, etc.
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Happy to help if I can :)