[CentOS-docs] Re: Opening of the Wiki - Part I

[Matt Sturtz]

Hi Ralph, et al--

As a noob (to this list, not to CentOS and definatly not to Linux), I
thought I'd throw in my .002...  I joined this list because I was
following the directions on the wiki for contributing -- after asking
around on IRC, I wasn't able to find any help in customizing centos-5 (for
Kickstart), and ended up hacking on it until I figured it all out...  I
was going to write up some docs for the wiki, but haven't had time yet
(and in general I like to lurk on a mailing list prior to posting to it
:-).

> b) Opening up the wiki
>
> We had some more or less internal talks about that on Fosdem and via
mail and on IRC. While the situation we have at the moment keeps
spammers away, it also keeps away people who would like to edit stuff on
the wiki or just correct an error on the page, as they have to create an
account, subscribe to this mailing list *and* get access to pages they
want to edit or correct.
>
> Opening up the wiki completely does mean, that we will have to deal with
spam, so we need an active Editor Group for the wiki - people who get
mails for each page which has changed (maybe even for comments, see
above) and check that against our (nonwritten) policy.

I'm very much in favor of opening up the wiki, as long as the mods/eds
keep tabs on every change (perhapps changes can be moderated, so they are
reviewed before going live?).  I would be willing to contribute in this
capacity from time to time (but don't expect 8hrs a day :-).  There should
be a balance to ensure that as much accurate information is available as
possible (which the current situation is far from -- probably due in part
to the work involved in getting access to write things up) while at the
same time carefully preserving the accuracy and completeness of those
pages that are available (no information is more desireable than wrong
information).

I think that if you require a real user (no anonymous) with a captcha and
an email cookie, you'll block out almost 100% of the spam.  Karanbir
already hit on this -- good.  Then you just have to worry about things
like people editing a page to ask a question inline, people posting wrong
or misleading information, etc.  Those are easy problems to solve with a
good mod/ed staff.  :-)

-Matt-