The down side of mass collaboration (guest post)

[This is a post from Brad, K12 OpenEd’s technical director.]

As much as we love the idea of mass (open) collaboration, there are problems inherent in any collaboration. You expect people to argue, and you expect different ideas regarding direction and approach. You really have to consider these good problems. The bad problems… Well, vandalism. Ugh.

We’ve had a rash of WikiSPAM lately. It’s obviously a targeted attack from some kind of botnet. All the posts target the same page and come from wildly different IP addresses. Also, the SPAM replaces its own SPAM over and over again. When we first noticed it was happening, there were fifty or sixty edits in a row from the SPAMbots. Each edit replaced its own SPAM with new SPAM.

What to do?

First thing, don’t get too down about it. Don’t turn off your wiki, and go home. Don’t hire investigators to track down and harm the monsters. Take a deep breath and…

Start watching the page on your wiki that shows recently changed pages. I visit this page several times a day. As soon as I see pages being replaced with SPAM, I revert the changes.

You can use the History section on a page to revert changes. Look back in the history for the newest good version of your page and restore it. Depending on your wiki (and version), you might be able to select it as the new page, or you may need to edit the page and save it as the newest version.

In our case, there was one page in particular that was being targeted. Once we restored the page, we temporarily disabled edits to that page. Generally, it’s safe to allow logged in users to still edit the page. It’s annoying that you have to basically turn off parts of your wiki for periods of time, it’s an expedient choice.

After you’ve dealt with immediate problem, start looking at technological solutions. Especially in the case of botnets, if you are having problems, others are too. This means that once a type of SPAM is identified, others can start looking for it and prevent it.

We use the MediaWiki software. It’s free and pretty well known. Also, there is an extension for fighting SPAM: SpamBlacklist. I had to upgrade our wiki to the latest version of the MediaWiki software before we could use it, but that was a good idea anyway. The nice thing about this extension is that it uses a shared database, as well as your own list of rules, for rejecting SPAM edits. One way to identify SPAM is by the URLs it inserts into your wiki. Once people see SPAM from a particular source, the URL gets added to a shared list, and then it’s blocked by all the wikis using the list. If you are having a specific problem, you can add the URL to your own private list.

You can also block IP addresses that have SPAMMED you. We do this, even though I think it’s better used against annoying individuals.

We would be very interested in hearing the ways you fight wiki SPAM.

Good luck!

When share alike doesn’t work

In discussing licensing options for open education items, I suggest that the CC BY license is in many ways the most open license. While share alike sounds like a great option, because it prompts sharing down the road, it is sometimes overly restrictive. It’s not always easy to envision how this might the case, so here is an example.

I am working with a school district to create a series of movies that highlight vocabulary and essential questions in their social studies curriculum. The essential questions come from their textbook, and the publisher has given permission to include these in the movies. Because this material is copyrighted, however, we cannot “share” the movies we are creating beyond this district (or others to whom the publisher has extended permission). As such, we can’t include any share alike images. This eliminates a lot of great material.

Wikis – Building content vs. displaying and using it

In education, we often run into objections to wiki-based content because of the potential for objectionable content. This kind of problem mostly stems from spam, and you don’t have to spend much time in wikis to see some pretty awful (and juvenile) examples of this.

We’ve wrestled with this problem a fair amount with our kids open dictionary project. We want this to be a mass collaboration project, but know that if there are instances of obscenities or other inappropriate content, it won’t be usable by schools.

Our solution is to separate the building — which will be done in a wiki — from the final version — which will be in a variety of “frozen” formats (ebooks, uneditable web pages, print, etc.). While the approach may sacrifice a bit in terms of ongoing updates (which still could be submitted by admins or emailed to admins by others), the upside, in terms of being able to ensure quality content while minimizing maintenance work, is high.

I think this is a good solution that many other wikis might find useful.

Sight word videos

I am working on creating some sight word videos from the word lists at FreeReading. (If you haven’t seen this site, it is a phenomenal resources for early literacy.)Before I crank out more of these, I’m looking for input from early literacy teachers.

  • How is the music? Too distracting or ok?
  • How is the timing?
  • Does the “pointing finger” idea work?

Any input anyone has is appreciated. I’m hoping to produce a whole library of these to match the FreeReading lists over the next few months.

Quotes about OER

I finally got around to redoing the home page for this site, and in doing so, I put together this gif of quotes I think express what OER is all about. (You may need to wait a second or so for it to load.)

Let me know if you know any quotes that should be added to this.

Also, as with other content on this site, feel free to use this for any purposes you like (with attribution to K12 Open Ed please).