Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[AllenJB]

Jan Kundrát wrote:
> AllenJB wrote:
>> While I would be pleased to see a wiki hosted on official resources as
>> Gentoo probably have far more resources at their disposal than any
>> user run site could hope to acquire.
>
> Hi Allen,
> that's great to hear, but it's actually a bit different from what Josh
> said earlier in a related thread [1]. I take it that you're actually
> open to being hosted by the gentoo infra, am I correct here? That'd be
> great to hear.

I'm only an admin. Thrasher, who actually runs the site, would be the 
one to make such a decision.

>
>> It's been suggested that the wiki be moderated by forum mods.
>
> I think that this idea got abandoned. We don't want to maintain the wiki
> pages.
>
> [snipped a bit about running wiki and proper workflows]
>
>> While a true wiki is open to editing by all, and you may opt to
>> protect certain articles (because you deem them to be "official" or
>> whatever), you will still need admins who will handle spam, page
>> deletions and user restrictions. You will obviously want admins for
>> each language you support. Who will they be and what will the
>> recruitment process be? Will they get any training?
>
> Well, in my opinion, the wiki is supposed to be self-maintained (as in
> "users themselves are expected to fix spam/vandalism/whatever"). Isn't
> that a concept that works on large wikis pretty well? Do you have
> reasons to believe that it won't work for a Gentoo one?

Wiki's are not self maintaining. I don't believe you've ever been 
involved with one to any extent if you believe this. Any unmaintained 
wiki will become a useless mass of spam and bad articles.

While most of the maintainence work is doable by registered users, there 
are some tasks which registered users can't (and you wouldn't want them 
to be able to) do, such as deleting articles and banning users. If you 
don't ban spammers and their IPs, they will just keep coming back and 
you'll have a snowball effect on your hands. While users can remove all 
content from any article, they can't actually delete articles (or 
undelete them). You'll want to do this to keep the wiki clean, otherwise 
you'll end up with lots of empty pages.

While users can do other chores such as moving pages to comply with 
naming conventions and checking and tagging articles that need cleaning 
up (and then actually cleaning them up), my opinion is that you will 
want a team of dedicated volunteers to do this. Give them a title like 
"Wiki maintainer" or something similar. While ideally users would do 
these tasks without such structure, I believe giving them titles (even 
if they don't get any powers over regular users) does help.


>
>> If you intend to create a wiki to replace gentoo-wiki.com, how will
>> you handle this? If the wikis end up running side-by-side, will you
>> have policies on copying from gentoo-wiki.com? (You should probably
>> have policies on copying from other wikis anyway)
>
> This reminds me of an "issue" with the license of your wiki. While you
> are of course free to choose any license you want for your projects,
> have you considered switching to CC-BY-SA instead of CC-BY-NC-SA? That
> is a license that is: a) used by all of the Gentoo documentation, b)
> compatible with the recent release of GFDL. The current license, while
> being a bit more protective about user's rights, prevents any contents
> from our documentation or, for example, the Wikipedia, to be used in
> your wiki and vice versa.
>
> And there's also one last point that I believe should be raised here.
> The gentoo-wiki.com, as it is now, currently violates some of the bits
> of our name-logo-usage document [2]. I believe this is not done on
> purpose, but rather as an error. Could you please have a look at the
> document and fix the wiki templates, so that it is compliant with our
> document?

We'll check the issues you've raised above and make any changes we 
believe necessary. Thanks for raising this.

>
> Please don't take me wrong here, I've personally found many of the
> resources available at your wiki really valuable (with some of the
> others being, well, broken). I was sad to see gentoo-wiki going down
> (and can realize your frustration when you can't reach your boxes
> anymore), but even more disappointed when users came to us, the Gentoo
> developers, and expressed that they weren't aware that none of the
> gentoo-*.com projects are *not* affiliated with Gentoo at all.

To my knowledge the wiki has always made best efforts to inform users 
that the site is official and has never claimed to be official in any 
capacity. It is and never has been the intention to mislead anyone in 
this regard.

AllenJB

>
> Cheers,
> -jkt
>
> [1]
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-doc/msg_9ffb2b35be3b5c6724f290dccd0897bf.xml
>
> [2] http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/name-logo.xml
>
>