On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 02:20 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
Although I've been and still am a strong advocate for wikis,
I appreciate that, especially now. I consider myself a convert because of advocates like you. :-)
I see three problems with this solution:
1) There must be a way for users to know if a given version of a wiki doc has been reviewed/validated by committers, and by whom, so they can estimate the reliability of the document.
(I have ideas for this based on status files stored in CVS and dynamically read by a JSPWiki plugin from viewcvs, but let's not talk about tools ;-)
Ok, let's try. However, this might be hard to do consistently, especially with docs that relate to a particular configuration. Plus, what if a user introduces something incorrect after it's been validated? I know they could check diffs against a validation date, but, that starts to get complicated.
2) There must be a way to archive the wiki docs when a release is done so people using older releases can get docs that are in sync.
(possible with a static archive of the wiki HTML pages)
Good point. I also think we need a way to generate a list of "approved" wiki pages for such releases, for example, without sandbox pages, etc.. I was hoping this could happen with wiki -> xdocs (via Forrest) with a linkmap that controlled which links expanded. Haven't had time to experiment though.
3) Giving more importance to the wiki might put more strain on the wiki administrator who might have more work fighting with trolls or sabotage. Steven, what do you think?
Steven, I volunteer to help. As for trolls, some of this can be discouraged with the password-protection front end. I already volunteered to help develop that (in an email to Steven off-list) but haven't been recruited yet. Seems to me we could have a rotating committers/users on troll-watch duties, if these trolls don't get dealt with informally.
Diana
