Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

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%2FPa geComment#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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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

Ralph Angenendt wrote:
> 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.

This could be done with Mailman if the editorial team also will act as
moderators for the centos-docs list. We can set mails from non-members
as moderated, so these mails will pop up as a request with the mailing
list moderators. Problem with that: At the moment we discard mails from
non-members, so I have no idea how much spam is hitting this list - and
that would also have to be dealt with by the editorial team then.

Cheers,

Ralph
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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

Ralph Angenendt wrote:



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.



So how would that work - you could post/edit without even having an
account? I see how that would lead to spam.


I would prefer to see a system whereby a user still needs to register an
account, but once they have an account they can automatically create and
edit content. Might that be enough to deter spammers?


Overall, I'm in favour of opening up the process.


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.



Agreed. At the very least they need to agree to the Creative Commons
copyright license.




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 ...



I would certainly agree to moderate pages I have created and/or
currently maintain, but I wouldn't want to commit myself to being a site
wide moderator of content (or rather don't *expect* me to moderate other
pages - if I happen across bad stuff, of course I'd remove it, but I'm
not going to go looking). I consider this an acceptable consequence of
opening up the Wiki. If each page has one (or maybe more) people
assigned to moderate it, that could work.


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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

Ned Slider wrote:

Ralph Angenendt wrote:



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.


So how would that work - you could post/edit without even having an
account? I see how that would lead to spam.


You will still need an account to edit the wiki, and we increase the bar
for creating that account a little bit ( by making sure the email
address specified is unique, non spammy and deliverable ). So anyone
could get an account instantly.



--
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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

Karanbir Singh wrote:

Ned Slider wrote:

Ralph Angenendt wrote:



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.


So how would that work - you could post/edit without even having an
account? I see how that would lead to spam.


You will still need an account to edit the wiki, and we increase the bar
for creating that account a little bit ( by making sure the email
address specified is unique, non spammy and deliverable ). So anyone
could get an account instantly.





+1 for that - sounds like a good compromise IMHO.



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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Ned Slider <ned@unixmail.co.uk> wrote:
> Ralph Angenendt wrote:
>
>> 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 ...
>
> I would certainly agree to moderate pages I have created and/or currently
> maintain, but I wouldn't want to commit myself to being a site wide
> moderator of content (or rather don't *expect* me to moderate other pages -
> if I happen across bad stuff, of course I'd remove it, but I'm not going to
> go looking). I consider this an acceptable consequence of opening up the
> Wiki. If each page has one (or maybe more) people assigned to moderate it,
> that could work.

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

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?

Akemi
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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

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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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 1:46 AM, Ralph Angenendt <ra+centos@br-online.de> wrote:
> 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?

This is *in addition to* the editorial team, not something exclusive.
The team should monitor everything as you wrote.

> 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.

Well, it may be related here. I suspect some authors may not want
their pages freely overwritten by others. I know this is against the
Wiki's spirit but nonetheless. I also understand their concern.

Akemi

> Cheers,
>
> Ralph
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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

Akemi Yagi wrote:
> This is *in addition to* the editorial team, not something exclusive.
> The team should monitor everything as you wrote.

Ah, okay. Then that was a misunderstanding on my side.

> > 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.
>
> Well, it may be related here. I suspect some authors may not want
> their pages freely overwritten by others. I know this is against the
> Wiki's spirit but nonetheless. I also understand their concern.

Then they should take care about their names being on that page >:)

Cheers,

Ralph
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Opening of the Wiki - Part I
 

Akemi Yagi wrote:

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 dont understand why someone's name needs to be on the page, for them
to be able to subscribe to the changelog for a page ?



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