[ILUG] Re: wiki software

[Niall Walsh]

Rory Browne wrote:

>Quoting Niall Walsh
>  
>
>>I don't think Wiki's are for everything, but they can be very useful.
>>They also take monitoring (though it seems we have some volunteers).  I
>>think we should probably be thinking of having a static site (which has
>>a wiki duplicate which can be pulled across periodically) and a wiki.
>>    
>>
>The place for a static is where you want to retain a
>tight grip of what the contents of the website are / will be.
>  
>
I do!   I think it would be a disaster area were scoil.linux.ie to read 
something like:

"You've been hax0r3d, should have used a real OS" or "can't find 
database.pm in program.pl line76" etc.

I'd be quite happy if it just statically read something like ... :

"Scoil Linux is a ... which hopes/plans/aims to ... You can join us in 
our wiki to find out more or join in"

and even have a comparable page in the wiki where people can propose 
updates to that page (perhaps auto-updating if a change has survived X 
days a la debian testing).

The rest can be housed in the wiki, and as good content develops we may 
want to build other static areas.

>We have no content, let alone time-independent content. We have about
>ten volunteers(by the looks of things), to keep track of, er... ten
>people, and we need to encourage more. This is the time for a free(as
>in freedom) non-moderated wiki. Perhaps as people and content
>accumulated, if people started defacing the wiki, we could switch to
>an account based system, as the need presented itself. We should not
>start off assuming that people are going to abuse the system, nor
>should we start off by assuming that people will submit content to our
>wiki no matter how difficult it is.
>  
>
I strongly believe we should have at the very least a static homepage, 
for now that's probably all it should be.

Does anyone have any experience of levels of vandalism on open wiki's 
now and how much work anyone wanting to firefight it might be in for?   
Do people still have open wiki's out there?

I would guess our registration routines would probably be as easy as 
wiki editing?   If this is an issue, we could try to provide an email 
address which anyone can email to add pages to the site along with an 
easy way to add new pages to the same section/index page and therefore 
lock all anonymous content into one area (preferably un-indexed and 
always trying to get a ral user to save or delete it if they read it), 
make a registered user pull it out to the real site?   So you have a 
static site, a real wiki, and an anonymous contribution area?  Of these 
the anonymous contribution area would be my first for the chop as it 
would b sure to have the highest signal to noise ratio!  This could 
leave anonymous contributions readable, but only by looking for them (so 
a normal visitor should not see rubbish, but may miss the very freshest 
anonymous nugget if it hasn't been seen by a registered user).

>Perhaps tomorrow will be the time for a moderated wiki, or static
>site. Perhaps tomorrow, we'll have a problem with the submission of
>inapproperate content. Perhaps tomorrow we'll have to make the site
>static. Today we need a non-moderated dynamic site that makes it easy
>for submitters from a variety of backgrounds, and a variety of
>technical competancies, to add to our site.
>
>  
>
Well I'm not volunteering to be on firefighting/clean-up duty for un 
unmoderated wiki, and I would not be too comfortable with advertising 
the url of one to non-technical people.   My preferred approach would be 
a static homepage/site which leads people to the bulk of the content in 
a wiki which can only be edited by registered by email users, using a 
captcha or something on registration to try and make it messy for 
spammers (provide an email address to a human who can process requests 
for vision impaired people).

Also ... and here we go again ... I think we should be making people 
agree to license anything they do for the wiki under something like a 
Creative Commons license (or some other consistent, freedom giving, 
terms (preferably debian free), what does wikipedia do?) and really to 
do this we have should have some authentication and agreement from them?

>I know that this makes it possible for spammers, and crap-artists to
>put shite on the site, but I think we should have a little faith, and
>leave Murphys law to one side for a while.
>  
>
Faith in what?  The volunteers ability to clean it up without tiring of 
the project in any way, or spending less time on more productive things 
because they have to deal with the junk?  Or faith in the "spammers" 
ability to exploit any opportunity?

Niall