34
Just to give some background on this project: it's indeed something I'm doing on my own, independent of Stack Exchange. There are more independent 'volunteer' projects around the Stack Exchange network, e.g. Smoke Detector (which I'm also a member of) which automatically flags spam across the network (including MathOverflow), and a dozen bots performing ...
15
The problem seems to be more serious: the tag wiki edits by this
user seem to copy-paste material from sites like MathWorld,
which requires a license for commercial use
(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/faq.html#copyright),
for example, https://mathoverflow.net/tags/axiom-of-choice/info
is copy-pasted from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AxiomofChoice.html.
...
8
The easiest way to completely prevent such edits on this specific post is to make it longer than 400 characters. There is an additional check for anonymous edits that rejects any edit that swaps out most of the post, but this check is disabled for very short posts as it is not reliable enough.
Rejecting the edit as vandalism will also signal the network ...
8
IP blocking is already done automatically. Make sure to reject the edit for vandalism so that the right mechanisms are triggered. If you see repeated acts of vandalism on the same post, then also flag that post for moderator attention so that a human can look at it.
7
There is a new system in place (rolled out late last year) that protects from this sort of thing. It's fed off of the community and moderators taking normal actions, and it's global to the network.
If users on Stack Overflow (as an example, all sites feed into and subscribe to it) reject edits as spam, they significantly impair the ability of the spammer ...
2
As pointed out in the question, the problematic tag-wikis came mostly from a single user. Since this user has deleted his account in the meantime, they can be no longer found through his profile page. (In case somebody wants to help and improve the tag-wikis which are still missing source/attribution.)
To help with this problem, here are a few SEDE queries ...
2
Since there was a moderator flag, I went ahead and performed the edit to the question based on asm's "answer" and evident intentions.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
