Hello all,

Apologies if I sound like a broken record, but I want to raise the issue of spam on the Wikimedia UK wiki again as it seems nothing has happened since Sammy/TheresNoTime reported the issue a few weeks ago.

There are currently over 75,000 pages on the wiki, and I'd wager that about 95% of them are spam. Hundreds of pages of vacuous crap are created every day.

[Warning - links contain adult text content]

The spam ranges from the bizarre to the offensive, and includes links to services that may be illegal in the United Kingdom and elsewhere (e.g. unregulated pharmacies, cannabis products, and supplements making medical claims). I found these examples with a thirty second search, and I do not doubt that there are worse ones out there.

I realise & respect that most of the people involved with the running of the site are volunteers or only employed by WMUK on a part-time basis, but given that the initial actions Sammy proposed (preventing anonymous editing and locking down account creation) would take about ten minutes maximum I am befuddled as to why they've not been implemented.

I know that Sammy offered their help, and I am also happy to assist with the fixes and clean-up. (I'm an administrator on the English Wikipedia and have administered MediaWiki installations myself, if it helps.)

Thanks for reading,

Richard / (User:Firefly on Wikimedia projects)