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

Sun May 18 16:12:35 UTC 2008
Ralph Angenendt <ra+centos at br-online.de>

Good News, everybody!

Maybe not yet, though :)

There are two things I'd like to get at with this mail.

a) This also has something to do with Ned's mails from yesterday - we
have two FAQs at the moment (on www.centos.org and on wiki.centos.org)
and we want to unify those, if possible on the wiki. The one feature the
www version has and the wiki one doesn't is comments - and we really
want to have that.

So I went ahead and installed the PageComment2 plugin on the development
version of the wiki, which allows you to anonymously comment on wiki
pages. To minimize spam, I enabled the "global antispam feature" of the
wiki, which checks every save against the list at
<http://master.moinmo.in/BadContent>. This also is enabled on the real
wiki, which means that saving articles might take a bit longer at the
moment. 

I'd like to ask those of you who are in
<http://wiki-m.centos.org/EditGroup> to toy around a bit with the
comment plugin. There might be some people in there who do not have an
account on wiki-m - just go ahead and create one.
<http://moinmo.in/MacroMarket/PageComment2?action=show&redirect=MacroMarket%2FPageComment#head-2c718f2ee00772e4b21efd1311a56ff8e21f9195>
has instructions on how to use the comment macro, I already put it on
<http://wiki-m.centos.org/FrontPage> and
<http://wiki-m.centos.org/FAQ/General>.

One thing which directly bothers me is that you can have only *one*
comment field on each page, so there is no way to add a comment box to
each of the questions in the FAQ section. If you do so, all comment
boxes will show *all* comments.

If people in here think that this could work, I would put that into the
Footer of each wiki page, so comments will be enabled on *all* wiki
pages. And hope that people delete or tell us about bad content in those
comments.

Which directly brings me to part two of this mail.

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. 

The second thing: I would still like to know about contributors (and
have contributors "sign" some sort of policy): We do not want to have
content where people are told to build from sources, to always use the
most current versions, we do not want advocacy on the wiki.

Moin as we know it cannot do that on the account creation page. So there
would be two solutions: Allow everyone to edit content everywhere except
on especially hidden or protected pages and/or create a new account
creation mechanism for moin. Or as a third way: Require people to mail
their account names to the above mentioned editor team with some
"signed" text we'd still have to write up. Then - in a timely fashion -
one of this editor group can put that account on the EditGroup page.

Discuss! (and please edit your mails, so we all can see which part of
this rather longish mail you are replying)

I'd like to have your opinion on both things - comments and the opening
of the wiki - an if you want to be in that Editor team, you can also
raise your hand now ...

Cheers,

Ralph
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