Please disable page creation on the wiki temporarily

[John Ralls]

On Nov 25, 2012, at 9:09 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 25, 2012, at 5:50 AM, Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> wrote:
> 
>> Am Samstag, 24. November 2012, 23:32:55 schrieb John Ralls:
>>> It would be
>>> nice to have a "nuke" function that does both at once.
>> 
>> Yes, that would be nice, but apparently this doesn't exist.
> 
> ISTR that wikimedia is scriptable, but I'll have to do some research.
> 

To follow up, yes, Wikimedia is scriptable [1], but it isn't easy. They're redoing their extension code to use Lua in the hope of making it easier.

That said, there are already some mass-delete extensions [2], in particular Nuke [3] which allows mass-deleting spam pages. I don't immediately see any blocking in it, but it illustrates what can be done.

As an aside, Gramps [4] has a setup that requires one to solve a simple arithmetic problem when committing an edit with external links. I don't know if that would be effective in discouraging the sort of spam pages I deleted yesterday -- which looked like they were created by live humans -- but it's worth considering.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Extensions
[2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam
[3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke
[4] http://www.gramps-project.org