On 2/2/13, Frederick Grose <[email protected]> wrote: > Be assured that all changes saved in a wiki can be recovered from the 'View > history' tab for a page.
Indeed. But sometimes one has worthy reasons for assigning pre-emptive editorial power over a page to an individual. For example, shouldn't the current leader of the Marketing Team have exclusive write-control over the Marketing Team page? That need not prevent petitioners from making change suggestions on its Discussion page, as you noted immediately below. > While one is reconstructing an existing page, it is often best to copy it > to a separate page as content details are worked out. Open discussion (on > the associated 'Discussion' page) with other interested authors will > generally lead to improvements. Having a "watch" set on a page is not the same as having the time to respond to changes every week, much less every hour. I think it would be useful if everyone with wiki login credentials had a quota of space for creating content they ALONE can write. Not only could they create NEW content they alone control, but they could also create and nominate full-blown REVISIONS of content OTHER people alone control for linking from the respective Discussion page of the latter. The Wikipedia article on the Wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki interprets Wiki creator Ward Cunningham's book so: "A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors." If one accepts this, then it might be useful for a heading on EVERY page of the wiki to state just that and link to a conjugate non-Wiki Website for such casual visitors. That way, e.g., Sean Daly's prospective wiki-illiterate teachers would not be denied the chance to peruse the wiki, but at the same time would be properly served by immediate referral to the material intended for their eyes. I hope you will also consider the Wiki education suggestion I made on your personal page. For about a third decade, between summer 2005 and late 2008, I tried to seed wiki literacy in my literacy-phobic rural USA community. It started with a digital technology course I gave at a new local public library, whose remarks about wikis lie within the lesson on asynchronous groupware at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gahchs/BHPL/FOTL/DigTech/Chapter4/ I only managed to get two people to attempt wiki writing. One was a woman in her 30's with a Bachelor's degree in Russian who commuted to work in India, and had experience as an exchange student in Russia. The other woman, in her 40's, was a non-degreed engineer who manages a state highway construction crew, and whom I think recently became a member of the county development authority. Both gave up almost immediately due to the challenge, rather than their disbelief in the utility of wiki-writing. (I had them try using Wikispaces.) The first public evidence of wiki literacy in this part of the state I encountered was a link to a staff-only wiki on a public Web page of the regional public library system within the last couple of years. (Aside: I must say that I was shocked that as C-SPAN's BookTV programming celebrated its fifth anniversary some years ago, I discovered that the assistant director of this regional system had never heard of its existence.) Let me close by assuring you that my previous inquiry was not rhetorical: Frederick, is it possible to give an individual user the exclusive power to write a particular wiki page within the MediaWiki system we use here at Sugar Labs? Thanks. Ron _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
