[ILUG] content required for YOUR WEBSITE

[Ken Guest]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 07:28:55PM +0000, Proinnsias Breathnach wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 11:02:33AM -0800, Justin Mason wrote:
> > >ah, doesn't seem like a good thing.
> > >I'm not particularly enamoured with the thoughts of the linux.ie website
> > >getting "wiki-spammed".
> > 
> > You see, when any one of the 1000 ILUG subscribers can revert that spam
> > edit, it's a trivial issue.   To be honest, I can't remember the last time
> > I had to deal with wiki spam. 
> > 
> > Perhaps you should look into existing wikis, to see how they work?
> > It sounds like you're quite unfamiliar with them.
> > 
> Actually, I'm sure Ken's a regular wiki contributor to various sites -
> but at the same time the 1337^H^H7 members who have bothered registering
> to add/update/alter content on the site don't do a whole lot (myself
> included I'll admit). It doesn't really bode well for people to come
> along and correct misleading entries.
> 
right on the ball; I've over 500 contribs made to wikipedia, with quite a few of
my edits involving reverting vandalism back to previous versions of the
articles, and I've recently modelled a plugin architecture for a project based
on mediawiki's approach.  I've also browsed and researched other wikis
(moinmoin, kwiki and a good few others as well).

What I'm really not enamoured with is the level of apathy people exhibit.

If I thought that there was a genuine 'return' on the effort required to import
the existing collection of articles and reviews into a wiki format, I'd be all
for it; I'm yet, if ever, to reach that conclusion with regards to the
www.linux.ie site though.

If it weren't for that I'd be busy writing hooks for mediawiki so the existing
accounts could be used for authentication/wiki-logins and the News System,CD
Burners, Who's Who and other dynamic portions of the existing website wouldn't
have to be reworked.

> As wikipedia have found out, even obviously incorrect information can
> stay on a page for months before anyone updates it - and quite often, it
> was the journalist who planted the information who comes back and
> corrects it a few months later (I've seen at least three or four
> articles about that particular problem).

Now, scale this from the huge number of wikipedia enthusiasts down to the
relatively, to put it politely, tiny amount of people bothering with the
www.linux.ie website - how long do you think some bad edits could remain on the
site for?

Yes we could set up hooks so that diffs of edits get posted to the main mailing
list, but as with the links at the top of the site, not everybody will notice
them - which may well mean that the bad edits/acts of vandalism etc etc will
still go unnoticed.


k.

-- 
Ken Guest
Irish Linux Users' Group webmaster, www.linux.ie
Mobile: +353 86 8252 141