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

Mon May 19 08:46:26 UTC 2008
Ralph Angenendt <ra+centos at br-online.de>

Akemi Yagi wrote:
> The principle of Wiki is participation of anyone who wishes to
> contribute.  That of course raises a question of how we can maintain
> the contents correct or appropriate.  I agree that having an editorial
> group consisting of knowledgeable people is a good idea.  Now, as
> exemplified in Ned's comment, there are Wiki articles that have been
> most exclusively maintained by the original author.  And there are
> pages whose original author is no longer active but instead is being
> maintained by another person.  Naturally, those who are currently
> looking after the articles might want to take responsibility.

Sure, I guess that that would work *if* those authors monitor changes in
their articles. 

> Therefore I would also like the idea of assigning a person/people to
> each page if (or whenever) we have such volunteers.

Do you think we have that many people? Does that mean that noone else
monitors those pages for changes? 

I'm talking about an editorial team which should monitor ".*" - all
pages on the wiki. This is mostly not about finding errors or mistakes
in contributions, but finding out abuse of the wiki. When people only
monitor the pages they edited, there is no way we'll find out when
someone *creates* a new malicious page. I do hope that people monitor
pages that they created or worked upon for weeding out documentation
errors. 

Sure, the editorial team can also do that, but that is not the reason
for the team to be there.

> I made a similar proposal a while ago in this list and the subject was
> briefly touched upon:
> 
> http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-docs/2007-October/000734.html
> 
> As you can see in that thread, placing a moderator's name on each page
> was opposed by a few core members of the CentOS team.  Then the
> discussion sort of died down.  I'd like to know, if the name(s) are
> hidden from the readers, assigning maintainers would be agreeable to
> them.  Any more thoughts or ideas?

I still think that that should be left to people doing those pages
themselves (or do you know of any automatic way to do so which doesn't
get overwritten when a page is changed by somebody else?) - but hey,
that's only my opinion. And I think that this is a rather different
issue altogether.   

Cheers,

Ralph
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