Interesting conversation.
http://everything2.com/ is another interesting example in this space.
They keep all the content associated with an author. They have a surprisingly complex scheme for getting a feedback loop that they hope will create quality. One thing that fascinated me about was that they users of that system seemed a little unclear what 'quality' they were trying to create. After a while the quality being maximized that seemed to emerge was 'cool'. I had a fun discussion with somebody from that group about how it might be entirely different if people rated the content using icons. I might say that one entry has very "smilie-face" while another bit of content was very "tree", "bicycle", "cloud", etc. That it would have created multiple quality vectors that the system could hill climb over.
In any case that system is kind of 80% wiki plus 20% slashdot with a mess of learning from the slashdot experience thrown in for free.
Sorry for not really replying to your note. It's a big fuzzy topic...
- ben
On Saturday, February 1, 2003, at 02:50 AM, Costin Manolache wrote:
On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Ben Hyde wrote:
Costin Manolache wrote:My point was: if someone posts a mail with pointers to warez or porn or
spam - it will get through and will be archived in the mailing list
archives.
Humm, are we arguing with the stop sign here? We seem close to a settling in on that rare and wonderful thing - a consensus about what to do. Is this hair splitting moving us toward that delightful goal?
I'm sorry for not beeing clearer - I fully agree with most of what you say, and I think making the wiki more structured is good for many reasons. There is no doubt that having oversight - people keeping the wiki under control - is good.
My concerns is over where do we draw the line - after the oversight is in place. The extremes are clear - porn will be removed, and excelent documentation will be included in the products and their authors may become committers.
What happens in between is a different story. My opinion is that wiki should be treated as mailing lists - and not as source code in CVS and subject to consensus.
The real problem is not the warez or porn - that's something we'll know
how to handle. What if someone creates a page ApacheFooSucks ( where Foo
is one of the apache projects ) ? And it includes a list of problems
and arguments - just like he would do it in the mailing list. Are we
going to remove it - or just create ApacheFooIsGreat with
counter-arguments ? What if it's about JCP ? Or GPL ? Or the
best web development technology ? Do we keep or remove those pages ?
Maybe I'm missing the scale of the point your making. I'll admit I
find it an interesting analogy, so I'll take the bait ... but first ...
I think the problem is a bit larger than warez and the need to monitor wiki. Chosing where to draw the line between free opinions ( as in mailing lists ) and full consensus ( as in code committs ) is a bit harder than sending notifications to the mailing lists ( where we seem to have a pretty broad agreement ).
The really important argument you make is:
I do see a striking difference between the wiki and the mailing list. The mailing list is the transcript of a conversation among assorted parties.
I do see wiki as a transcript of opinions and ideas of a user. It's better than the mailing list because it has structure and link and doesn't get lost. But it's fundamentally the same - an unbound number of people posting their toughts.
If we treat the wiki as:
The Wiki, on the other hand, give the impression of being the document of the organization (or I hope a PMC). The readers and the writers of
then we are bound to be disapointed and we'll misuse wiki.
IMHO what's important is to find a way to make it clear and agree that wiki is not the oficial document of apache, just like the opinions of apache members posted on mailing lists are not the apache oficial position.
( sorry for cutting parts of your reply )
Costin
that document are encouraged to treat it in that way. So if I go in
and write something stupid, rude, lame, illegal, embarrassing in the
Wiki the first impression of the reader is not "who ever wrote this is
a twit" it's that "this document's authors are twits." The association
seems much stronger.
You could argue the same thing is true in a mailing list. If I enter a
mailing list and the first few posting are twit-rich(tm) I am as likely
to think "The people on this list are twits." as the more accurate
"Those three are being twits today."
It's interesting to consider the very nice example of PHP's easy to edit manual annotations. When you read those pages you get a very clear dividing line between the content that is reflects upon the reputation of the PHP doc team and the vs. the content that reflects upon random individuals. As a user of that manual I know to take the comments with a grain (often a very large grain) of salt.
Of course this whole business about how to design systems that have low
barriers to entry but then filter out the really good stuff is at the
heart of open source, source forge, everything2, etc. etc. Lots of
room for experimentation. Presumably when people dis source forge they
are critical of the balance they have struck between barrier to entry
and filtering.
- ben
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