Wikis - Powerless in the Face of Spam?

I am beginning to wonder whether wikis as a form of communal projects are doomed in the long run apart from a small number of specific applications. Sure, Wikipedia will continue to exist, as will a number of other specific projects. But large wiki farms, which maintain the majority of wikis out there, are under continued and increasing assault by spammers.

You are all familiar with email spammers which clutter up your inbox and your spam folder. But they are not the only form of spammers out there. Email spammers just send massive amounts of emails to other people in the hopes that one of the recipients will actually answer or click on the embedded links and do something foolish. But other spammers are out there to increase the prominence of other web sites in search engines - and the algorithms search engines such as Google use determine how important a particular website is (and thus, how soon it comes up in the search results) by calculating how many other websites link to it. While they have added lots of refinements to their search algorithms over the years, this still remains true - so if someone wants to promote a third-rate website of some third-rate company, they need to make sure that this website gets as many external links as possible.

Enter wiki spammers.

Large wikifarms - such as Wikidot.com, which is the platform I am using for my own projects have lots of active wikis. But they have an even higher number of half-abandoned projects which haven't been worked on for years. And many of these wikis allow anyone to edit their pages, whether they are ordinary registered users or even anonymous editors - after all, the whole point of wikis is to make editing them as easy as possible for everyone. Thus, it also becomes easy for wikis to add spam links to them - that is to say, links to the websites they want to promote, whether those links are appropriate to the wiki in question or not - and they are almost never appropriate.

I first became aware of one new spammer on May 23rd when he vandalized one of my wikis. Naturally, I reversed the changes and banned that user, and he was also banned from Wikidot.com. But a few days later he was back with a new user account and reverted my changes so that the spam links would appear again.

Then he did something that really angered me: He deleted the start page and the navigation toolbars on another one of my wikis, presumably so that it would be harder to reverse his edits. But this only made it personal, as after I restored these pages from Archive.org, created backups for all my wikis and implemented admin blocks for the most vital pages I vowed to stop him not only on my wikis, but on all wikis where I found his spam. I researched his activities, observed his user profiles, reported his new accounts, and reverted his new changes, many of which were only reversing my edits to get his spam edits. In the last few days, this had reached a fever pitch - he made hundreds of edits (almost all reversals of my earlier edits) every day, and as soon as I managed to get his current account banned he started a new one. So far, the tally of his user accounts which I positively identified is:

• Ayna: 8 edits
• baraaa: 29 edits
• baraaas: 135 edits
• Borneos: 32 edits
• Ellias: 43 edits
• gerrardo: 98 edits
• jajaaa: 123 edits
• jikons:28 edits
• jiks: 67 edits
• jikunsss: 67 edits
• jikunz: 13 edits

And with the assistance of several other Wikdot folks, I set out to revert them all. He had become my own personal White Whale, with each striving to undo what the other had wrought. At times the editing history of certain pages looked like this:






 

Fortunately, yesterday the Wikidot.com team implemented some new filters which largely seem to be doing the trick - the flood of spam had become a trickle by this morning, and now Wikidot.com is largely empty of his spam apart from a few pages on wikis for which I don't have the necessary permissions to edit them.

Still, I have no doubt that he will be back some day, with new tricks or on a different wiki farm. And if he won't come back, others will. As a wiki farm expands and the number of fallow wikis increases, wiki spammers will come in greater and greater numbers and become more and more aggressive, with better and better scripts. Will anti-spam measures improve in equal measure, or are they doomed to fail before the onslaught just as ordinary emails are drowned out 2:1 by spam emails?

Time will tell. But to my eye it isn't looking good.