Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
If you switch to forcing users to register in order to edit, then you
get spam bots creating user accounts, which are harder to delete. So
far, it does not take much work to delete the spam using the
mediawiki admin tools ("delete", "protect", "watch", etc.) I am
pretty sure that is how it is done on wikipedia.
not being a very active wikipedia user, i nevertheless seem to remember that they use captchas (yes indeed) for verification if (and only if- i think) you are adding URLs to a page. this makes spamming sites much less attractive.
i know that you are opposed to captchas, but i still think it is a good compromise between not having to create accounts and a reasonable protection against spam.
fgmadsr IOhannes