On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Steve Sanbeg<[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> Exactly, which is my main point I'm trying to make here. We've got >> a situation right now where we've got documentation that we say >> is _the_ source for info about MediaWiki, and yet we cannot vouch >> for it. >> >> I don't think our major issue is vandalism or people purposefully inserting >> false information, but more so users who don't really know exactly >> what they're changing, they just know what worked for them. I've got >> several docs I've looked at in the past several days that suffer from this: >> clueless people trying to be helpful. >> >> Not that we should discourage helpful people, but helpful people don't >> always know what they're talking about; at least not well enough to >> allow them to set the documented standard :) >> > > Yes, but the help namespace is a much simpler, less controversial place to > start than other parts of the wiki. > > This issue was brought up there years ago, long before there was any > technical means to address it. > > The idea is these pages could be mirrored to a local site, but the problem > is that mirrored set could easily contain vandalized, wrong, or nonsense > pages that would need to be sorted out, which pretty much rules out any > kind of automated mirroring, which was part of the point of setting it up > that way. Flagged revisions could simply fix that. > > In most pages, unless the flagged revision was shown by default, it > wouldn't be too useful. Here, as long as you can access the flagged > revision easily, i.e. via the API, it would solve a real problem without > discouraging editors by preventing their work from being shown on the site. > > And, really, help pages don't need to change that often, so a brief lag > wouldn't be a problem. If fact, it could even be useful, i.e. to document > new features as they are implemented, but flag which version of the page > applies to the latest quarterly release. > > Although it's good if the developer can document every detail, it may not > be practical for them to spend a lot of time polishing the document, if > they can at least get their point across quickly. From what I've seen, > misspellings and bad grammar tend to cause a bunch of IP edits, but these > tend to sort themselves out. The problem is when the documentation is > unclear, people may clarify things that they don't understand. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >
As a followup to all of this discussion: is there really any reason we can't go ahead and give this a try? I think Help and/or Manual are really the only namespaces that need it, as they are the documentation namespaces. Most other stuff tends to be just general notes, etc which don't really need review. -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
