Overall, I find that a good wiki implementation overcomes any problems with folks overwriting.
The wiki movement is much like the open source movement, or Tom Sawyer's method for whitewashing a fence for that matter. I'd spent quite a lot of time in bars at computer conferences with Ward Cunningham who invented the wiki concept, and I've been wiki'ing almost since the beginning. Ward's (the) original wiki is still there at c2.com and the article there about "why wiki works" at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks is still good reading. I've actually been running wikis for the past six months or so. I started out with twiki, but switched to mediawiki when I needed to do things with more intensive use of images. My specialized wiki deals with manned spaceflight history and in particular the Mercury program (and building scale models of the Mercury spacecraft) . The entry page is at http://www.denhaven2.homeip.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page I haven't had too much problem with changes I didn't want. I did have some sicko vandalize a few pages, but I found that it was: 1) Easy to find using the recent changes special page and 2) Easy to fix and 3) Easy to ban the offender A good wiki does version control on the articles. Mediawiki is particularly good at letting you detect and fix unwanted changes. One reason is that it has to be since it's used for the wikipedia which is perhaps the best known, and therefore most vulnerable to vandalism wiki in the world. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
