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Issue #1793

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Consider locking critical wiki pages

Added by Wolfgang Wiedmeyer over 7 years ago. Updated over 3 years ago.

Status:
New
Priority:
Normal
Category:
Website and wiki content
Target version:
-
Start date:
04/13/2017
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Resolution:
Device:
Grant:
Type of work:
System administration, Wiki editions

Description

We have quite a few wiki authors. However, a lot of them were inactive for several years. I think when we encourage users to get involved, editing the wiki should be one of the first recommended tasks. Besides knowledge of English and the matter at hand, there is no special knowledge or experience required to edit the wiki.

When someone gets wiki access, it's usually for fixing some smaller mistakes on usage pages or adding information to instructions (e.g. build instructions). These edits require review, but there is not a high level of trust in the wiki author required because mistakes there can't have serious consequences. This makes it possible to get a lot more people involved without having high requirements to get wiki access.

However, the same wiki author that fixes a typo on a usage page has access to the page where all Replicant images are listed and to the page with the signing key information. If a wiki author wants to make a malicious change, he can do so. An example would be replacing links to Replicant images with links to malware and changing the GPG key information to the attacker's key information, so users are downloading and verifying malware without their knowledge.
Changes are logged on the activity page and some (including myself) receive a mail notification about the change. But we might not react fast enough for various reasons or we might not even notice the malicious change because it was cleverly masked with other mundane changes.

It is possible to lock wiki pages. Paul, Denis and I can do this and then only project managers can edit those pages. I suggest locking pages like the signing key page and the images page. There is then still the risk that a rogue wiki author copies the signing key and images pages and replaces links to the actual pages with links to the newly created malicious pages. If we want to protect the wiki against those changes, the wiki index, installation pages and maybe the device pages need to be locked, too. This wouldn't be a big restriction. These pages are still only a subset of the wiki pages and users can still make suggestions for changes on these pages.

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