[Election-Methods] Electowiki de-spammed and upgraded to MediaWiki 1.10.1

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi all,

I spent a fair chunk of time despamifying http://wiki.electorama.com
(Electowiki), upgrading it to 1.10.1, and installing some extra
anti-spam measures on it.  Sorry for letting it get so bad.

It's been a very long time since an upgrade.  I believe it was
previously on 1.5.3, which was really crufty.  I've also set things up
so that upgrades are much easier for me to do, which means I should be
more likely to do them.

The two big anti-spam measures are the SpamBlacklist and ConfirmEdit
(captcha) extensions.  The former was instrumental in cleaning up, and
additionally in providing a defense against the really blatent spammers
by preventing linking to known spam targets (of the "buy viagra" ilk). 
The latter ups the ante for automated edits, by making editors from
anonymous IP addresses who want to add an outside link answer a simple
math question or possibly identify text in one of those funky images. 
It'll also be required for account creation.  I think the combination
will make it easy enough to stay on top of the spam for another year or
so before the arms race heats up some more.

There's a lot of new features now.  You can sift through here to find
the full list:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Important_Release_Notes

Changes that pop to mind:
*  You can now set it up to email you on all changes from pages on your
watchlist and/or on your user talk page
*  "Undo" link on all revisions for all users, sorta like "revert" for
sysops, except it requires review and comment, and can work on older
versions
*  Much more advanced template functionality
*  Better RSS and Atom feeds
*  Many, many little things here and there

I also pulled down wikitest.electorama.com (where Electowidget was
running).  It was too much of a spam magnet, and I need to update the
software before running it in public (which I can't imagine happening
for a while).  The source for Electowidget is still available.

Anyway, I hope you all still find it useful.

Rob