Wikis and community edited lists
Wikis carry an assumption borrowed from encyclopedias, that what you are reading has settled. On a small wiki it usually has not.
- What it proves
- Nothing
- Risk if trusted alone
- Moderate
- Safe use
- History is useful, current text is not
What you are actually reading
A wiki page is the most recent revision. Not the agreed version, not the reviewed version, the last one saved. On large well staffed wikis those converge because enough people are watching that a bad edit is reverted quickly. The convergence is a property of attention, not of the software.
The wikis in this space are small. They have few editors, most of whom are inactive, and pages about addresses get less attention than pages about anything interesting. So a page can sit in a bad state for a long time without anyone noticing, and there is no visual difference between a page fifty people watch and one nobody does.
The edit window
The attack is simply to make a change and wait. Its cost is close to zero and its expected value is whatever traffic the page gets before someone reverts it.
- Change one character. A single substitution in the middle of a fifty six character address survives casual review indefinitely, because nobody reads the middle.
- Edit during quiet hours. Editor attention has a rhythm and the gap between an edit and a revert widens predictably.
- Make it look like maintenance. An edit summary saying updated mirror looks exactly like the legitimate edits around it.
- Repeat. Being reverted costs nothing, so the same edit can return weekly for as long as it stays profitable.
The feature that is actually useful
Page history, which is the one thing wikis offer that no other channel does. It lets you see when an address appeared, who added it, whether it has been stable, and how often the page gets touched.
- Open the history and find the edit that introduced the address you are looking at.
- Check how old it is. An address added an hour ago on a page that is normally edited twice a year is worth pausing over.
- Look at what else that editor changed. A single purpose account that appeared to make one edit is a pattern.
- See whether the page has a revert history around addresses. Repeated reverts mean somebody is trying.
None of this proves an address is genuine. It is the closest any source channel comes to letting you audit a claim, and it is still only evidence about editing behaviour rather than about key ownership.
The linking problem
Wikis get cited heavily because they look neutral, so an address that lands on a wiki propagates outward into forum posts, directories and search results that cite it. By the time the wiki is corrected, the copies are not. This is the main way a single bad edit outlives its revert, and it is covered in how a link spreads.