Help:Reviewing edits and fixing spam

The mediawiki software has all kinds of tools for finding spam and getting rid of it; it just takes someone to monitor things and/or a community who's interested in participating in the monitoring.

Recent Changes (in the left navigation bar) is the main way to see who's done what and where.

The Recent Changes page gives, for each change, the options:

• DIFF shows the exact differences between the most recent change and the previous version.
• HIST displays the article's history page where you can do diffs between any two versions.

Both make it quick and painless to see exactly what changed.

You can use Recent Changes just to monitor how people are editing the wiki and to fix wiki syntax or organizational issues, to make sure that articles are well named, that links exist and are done well, everything's categorized, and so on.

In an environment with spam occurring and a lot of edits, you start to recognize usernames who are OK and usernames you've never seen before on Recent Changes, and then you check only those edits for possible spam.

People registered as Admin have rollback and undo choices on the diff and history pages:

• undo is just the single most recent change
• rollback undoes however many edits in a row the user made on that article. (You can also use those features when you make a bunch of changes that you realize that you shouldn't have for some reason.)

So really dealing with spam is pretty painless in this wiki software; someone just has to take the time to keep an eye out for it.