[CentOS-docs] New User Wishes to Contribute

[Brian Mathis]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 3:45 PM, R P Herrold <herrold at centos.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, Marcus Moeller wrote:
>
>> Why not granting Edit rights (and I mean full Edit Group Access) to
>> anyone who has already contributed good stuff.
>>
>> Then there should be something like a Wiki Admin group which will
>> track changes and correct them || start discussion on the MLs if
>> necessary.
>
> because creating a problem and fixing it ex post is harder
> than not creating it in the first place
>
> -- Russ herrold

Spam issues aside, that is the very concept of Wikipedia and other
wikis, and also for all modern VCS tools, and most of them have proven
that line of thinking really doesn't hold up.

Old VCS tools used the locking model to try to prevent errors before
they happened.  This created an issue every time someone needed a
file, even if they didn't need to change it, and pushed the problem
onto everyone all the time.  You also needed a dedicated admin who
could resolve old locks, etc....  Modern VCS systems recognize that
the problem should only be pushed onto users if there's actually a
conflict, and it allows everyone else to work while avoiding problems
most of the time.

What you currently have is the "lock model", and with few admins the
idea of opening up the system seems like a bad one because those
admins will need to deal with all those errors, but this is not the
case.  As soon as it's open, you'll have more people monitoring and
more people who can fix errors as they are introduced.