[CentOS-docs] Request for wiki editing policy change...

[Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller]

I'm a newbie at centos (hence my visiting a wiki on the subject in the
first place) but pretty savvy about wikis.

I got an account (Jen.RM) with the wiki thinking that would let me
edit a writeup that was broken.  Then I clicked on the contribute tab
thinking that maybe someone had renamed "edit" and I ended up here:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowToContribute

Having run wikis and had significant trouble with spam I understand
the inclination to not let random people edit the wiki, but once
you've verified "this is an actual person" it seems silly to me to to
introduce any further editing controls.  The distance between "ANYONE
edits" and "you can edit in stages based on demonstration of
commitment after explaining the content you want to contribute" is
rather large.  Anything more restrictive than "swiftly verified people
can edit anything" seems silly to me if the thing you're trying to
optimize is the number of helpful edits the wiki recieves (rather than
trying to optimize for a specific tone through a  strict editorial
policy).  Some people use wiki software for small groups that want to
impose strict editorial control... if that's your goal, cool... it's
just that I think a slightly looser policy would serve the generic
goal of "useful docs" better than your current policy.

Anyway.

I don't want to add a page. I don't want to maintain a page. I don't
want to prove my chops (because I don't actually want to get really
involved in "yet another online community" because my minutes are
precious).  I don't even want to make this particular edit at this
point... Logging in was "lots of overhead" to me.  Having to join a
mailing list and compose this email is a *huge* amount of overhead and
the only reason I'm doing it is that I suspect your docs would be much
much more useful to me a year from now if I convince you to open up
the editorial rules for all the people not willing to spend the time
to say something (the way I am now).

That said... http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Skype has an error.

Specifically, the link to http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Skype is being
redirected by Skype to http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/ making the
given command sequence fail.

An alternate location (for now, with unknown security stuff) that
makes the install appear to work is here:
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/infosys/phone/skype/rpm-public-key.asc

And there's a thread in the forums (where restrictive editorial
policies aren't the rule the way they are in the wiki) at
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=104055 that gives a work
around that I didn't try but would have if I hadn't found the
alternate key.

Happy wiki-ing :-)

Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller