We should think about implementing a little more security in the minor edit possibility. I guess there is a minor part of WikiEditor
?s looking at the edits on a regular base which raises the possibility for a vandal to
hide violent changes from the eyes of a significant part of the community. And I think the solution cannot be to force everybody to bother with the edits all the time.
One possible solution could be to fix a threshold of characters changed where checking "This change is a minor edit" would not have any effect anymore. -- DavidAndel
- My solution is for just a few frequent readers to watch the edits. I have seen a few cases of minor-edit vandalism, but none of those cases have been serious. On the other hand, I have sometimes used minor edits to restore vandalized pages (so that the person responsible doesn't see that they were restored). The Wikipedia site WikiPedia:RecentChanges decided to limit minor edits to people who have chosen a login-ID.
- If vandalism became more frequent, I would probably react by making it easier to undo the damage. One approach would be an unedit-by-IP command that could automatically remove all edits by an offender over a certain time period. Another would be edit-rate limits (X pages per minute/hour). I am not planning on changing the minor-edit behavior of UseModWiki before the 1.0 release, however. --CliffordAdams
- Both these ideas are excellent Clifford ('unedit-by-IP command' and 'edit-rate limits'). Having battled spam on a usemod wiki for some time, I can tell you that these would help significantly.
- As for the minor edit discussion, I've seen very few cases of a spammer being smart enough to tick the minor edit box. I was labelling my reverts as minor edits for a while, because I thought it would cause both my revert and the initial spam to disappear off the RecentChanges for normal (hide minor edits) users, howeveer it doesn't do this. In fact it makes it look as if the spammer's change has not yet been reverted. I suppose it has to be this way. In the context of a spelling correction minor edit, this is the most useful behaviour... but I wouldn't recommend labelling spam revertions as minor edits. It's confusing for the normal users, and the spammer is unlikely to notice either way. -- Halz 18th Jan 2005
I am unsatisfied with default value for the minor edit checkbox. The creation of a page is surely a major edit, so the default unchecked box is OK. But afterwards, the majority of edits are minor and nobody on our Intranet takes the time to fill the summary field and check the box. What are your experience ? -- JeanPhilippePapillon
- My interpretation of "minor edit" is an edit that is so minor that you do not care if other people read your change, like a spelling correction or formatting improvement. Any new content is a major change to me. If you really want this change, I can tell you how to edit the code to do what you want, but I don't plan on changing the defaults. --CliffordAdams
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