I’ve seen spammers post things on article Talk pages a few times now. Typically they resemble automated spammy link drops that are blindly targeting blog comments, forums and wikis.
Today’s example:
Discussion Page Spam (click to enlarge)
Does this spam belong to you? If so, knock it off.
jRsXZO <a href="http://xjwjhwhamwon.com/">xjwjhwhamwon</a>, [url=http://geeollbgdvuv.com/]geeollbgdvuv[/url], [link=http://dvrwpktikfvc.com/]dvrwpktikfvc[/link], http://gftynqhyetij.com/
Strings like this have shown up about a half dozen times this week in edits to seemingly random articles. The edits originate from IP addresses, not logged-in users.
In one case, I reverted a spam edit and it re-appeared from a different IP within minutes. Protecting that article against edits from unregistered users prevented a third time.
Does this mean anything to anybody?
You may have noticed the AddThis button is missing from the left-hand toolbars on the wiki. Actually, you probably didn’t notice considering it was only used 16 times in the previous 6 months.
Given that Google is now officially including page load times in their ranking algorithms, I didn’t think the extra server calls were doing us any favors. Every little bit helps.
Conspiracy theorists and anti-Googlers may disagree, but I think that Google’s recent $2,000,000 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation is a great step forward. Here’s the full press release.
A notable quote from Google co-founder Sergey Brin:
“Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet. This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”
Now, hopefully they can get closer to a WYSIWYG editor and lowering the barriers to entry for new contributors.
Just logging in a couple subtle changes to the MediaWiki installation that may encourage more visitors to edit articles. By highlighting the edit buttons and links, I suspect a higher percentage of visitors will be likely to contribute or edit content.
We’ll measure this against the previously established Goal Tracking in Google Analytics that tells us that 7.6% of visits result in an article edit.
The traditional “edit” button on top of the content window now has a faint highlight:
Before
After
To achieve this effect, I updated my theme’s main.css file to include this new entry:
#p-cactions #ca-edit a {
background-color: #ffcc99;
}
Additionally, I moved the “Section Edit” links from the far right of each section header to just left of the h2 headline and applied the same faint highlight:
After
To accomplish this, comment out the float:right; in the existing .editsection entry in main.css and add a new entry for .mw-headline with a float:left; like this:
/* Edit section links */
.editsection {
/*float: right;*/
margin-left: 5px;
background-color: #ffcc99;
}
.mw-headline {
float: left;
}