Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller
2007-Dec-13 23:28 UTC
[CentOS-docs] Request for wiki editing policy change...
I'm a newbie at centos (hence my visiting a wiki on the subject in the first place) but pretty savvy about wikis. I got an account (Jen.RM) with the wiki thinking that would let me edit a writeup that was broken. Then I clicked on the contribute tab thinking that maybe someone had renamed "edit" and I ended up here: http://wiki.centos.org/HowToContribute Having run wikis and had significant trouble with spam I understand the inclination to not let random people edit the wiki, but once you've verified "this is an actual person" it seems silly to me to to introduce any further editing controls. The distance between "ANYONE edits" and "you can edit in stages based on demonstration of commitment after explaining the content you want to contribute" is rather large. Anything more restrictive than "swiftly verified people can edit anything" seems silly to me if the thing you're trying to optimize is the number of helpful edits the wiki recieves (rather than trying to optimize for a specific tone through a strict editorial policy). Some people use wiki software for small groups that want to impose strict editorial control... if that's your goal, cool... it's just that I think a slightly looser policy would serve the generic goal of "useful docs" better than your current policy. Anyway. I don't want to add a page. I don't want to maintain a page. I don't want to prove my chops (because I don't actually want to get really involved in "yet another online community" because my minutes are precious). I don't even want to make this particular edit at this point... Logging in was "lots of overhead" to me. Having to join a mailing list and compose this email is a *huge* amount of overhead and the only reason I'm doing it is that I suspect your docs would be much much more useful to me a year from now if I convince you to open up the editorial rules for all the people not willing to spend the time to say something (the way I am now). That said... http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Skype has an error. Specifically, the link to http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Skype is being redirected by Skype to http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/ making the given command sequence fail. An alternate location (for now, with unknown security stuff) that makes the install appear to work is here: http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/infosys/phone/skype/rpm-public-key.asc And there's a thread in the forums (where restrictive editorial policies aren't the rule the way they are in the wiki) at http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=104055 that gives a work around that I didn't try but would have if I hadn't found the alternate key. Happy wiki-ing :-) Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller