Allow anonymous posting on wiki type site

Fear vandalism/spamming

[webjourneyman]

I have a wiki type site idea. I´m considering if I should allow anonymous contributions and editing. I imagine the pros would be that not requiring registration more people would contribute since its easier (I for one am getting very tired of filling out registration forms). The cons that I fear are vandalism and spamming. What is your experience/thoughts on this?

[huwnet]

I was considering putting an admin-edited FAQ on my site.

I didn't look very well but in mediawiki the version management seemed very poor.

If you can find a wiki with version control then you can simply roll back the page to a non-vandalised page if anyone attacks it.

[Casethejoint]

We had a discussion about anarchy on wikis quite recently:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webjourneyman]

Thanks, it´s a very interesting discussion. I have one idea on how to defeat spamming, disable links withing the body of text, or restrict it in such a way that the poster would have to send a request to a moderator to activate links. What do you think?

[Casethejoint]

Well, the present forum has a broad "no external links" rule to prevent excessive self-promotion. Having such a rule could work if you are focusing on creating original content, and not that unreadable, blogospherically self-referential link-in-every-darn-word stuff. But in this case, not having links would be a matter of style and content quality, not spam protection.

There are better tools available, including CAPTCHA scripts, active mods, focusing the growth of your wiki and various degrees of user privilege. I still question whether once you get into a heavy regulation of users it's worth having a wiki at all though [grumble, grumble].