[Noisebridge-discuss] question for the panel, re: the wiki

[Danny O'Brien]

Soooo, we have a lot of user accounts on the Noisebridge wiki (over 500).

Lots and lots of them don't have any edits to their name. My crazed
suspicion is that many of these non-editors are actually throwaway spam
accounts (although why you'd create an account, and then not go spam crazy
is slightly beyond me -- our captcha stuff is mostly in the user creation
part). A lot of them certainly have strangely algorithmic names, and get
created at a fairly consistent pace.

I was thinking of going through and mailing all of the
people-who-are-users-but-have-never-edited-the-wiki and ask them to either
edit their user page, or have their accounts deleted. Then after a certain
time (10 days?) warning them again, then deleting the account.

Reasons for doing this:

* Purity of essence, and to gain a list of actual wiki users
* Encourage people who really are people and not spambots to put up a few
words about themselves.
* Long term, use the wiki user database as an openid/authentication system
for other NB resources. Creating a wiki account seems to be a good user
database, and it's on our critical infrastructurey bits.
d.

Does anyone have some good reasons why people would create a user account
but not edit the wiki that I'm missing? Anyone think this is a bad idea? I
can't think of a downside, but that just makes me suspicious. I have often
deleted things with guileless confidence in an attempt to keep things nice
and tidy and then regretted it.

d.
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