User:Tmtoulouse
From Wiki4CAM
I am an established editor at various wikis across the internet. Most notably I am at wikipedia as Tmtoulouse and at RationalWiki as Tmtoulouse. It will not take long to realize that I am one of the "evil" skeptics that this wiki fears so much. I do not plan on directly editing your articles, and have several areas of expertise that the site may find useful such as an intricate understanding of the mediawiki source code, extensions and markup language.
An important point to be raised is that Mediawiki is the ultimate extension of Web 2.0 software. If you truly wish to keep the reality based community off your site I suggest the following steps be taken:
- Disable account creation permanently
- Require an e-mail from the user with real name and identifiable information (avoid taking e-mail from freebie accounts such as gmail and yahoo).
- Have administrators make accounts for users that pass the litmus test
- Place these users in a trial user group that limits their access to editing tools
- Manually upgrade to normal accounts only after they establish a track record
However, there are reasons you might not want to do this. First of all most people who will edit on a wiki will not go through such steps to set up an account. A limited influx of new users means your community feels small and isolated. Established users don't feel that there is much of a "point" participating. Your site stagnates and goes nowhere.
You want to compete with wikipedia? You need to keep open registration but more importantly you need to be willing to allow users that disagree with you to participate on the site. The people who are most willing and able to work on wikis and have the most knowledge are disproportionately from the reality based community. Very few are out to "get you" but if shut them out you will have difficult time of it.
Recommended extensions to be installed
- Rename user allows admins to rename a user upon request.
- ParserFunctions greatly expands the built in parser functions and allows for much more complex template building, and page editing.
- New user log shows when a new user is created on recentchanges and says what the user name is.
- ConfirmEdit a superior captcha program to what you are using now
Other extensions to consider
These are common extensions that introduce some potential problems with privacy and licensing but are often used on wikis.
- Checkuser allows select admins to see what ips a user has been using and what accounts he has
- Oversight allows select admins to remove a diff from the database
