wiki whining

[Brett Dikeman]

Quick side note: please carry any further discussion onto the wiki  
mailing list.  I want to encourage people to join it and form a strong  
group there; it needs to get past a tipping point.  That won't happen  
if we keep discussing it here :-)  It also means Dan and I won't have  
to go archive-diving to see what people are saying on all the various  
lists (I only subscribe to 200q20v and quattro.)

Much more comments in-line below.

On Nov 17, 2007, at 10:50 AM, Scott Phillips wrote:

> I'm pretty sure the decision (by Dan or Brett) was to go ahead and get
> and install MediaWiki. As I think it was "my" post that seemed to  
> bring
> this to a head I want to take a min and explain my thought.

Well, to be completely honest, I've been pushing hard since well  
before the wiki died, to switch to Mediawiki.  Lots of people know  
Wikitext thanks to Wikipedia, and the software has a very professional- 
level, intensive, constant development stream by a group that shares  
my/Dan's concerns with regards to security and vandalism  
"prevention".  In short, we benefit greatly from the fact that the  
Wiki Foundation and Wikipedia stand behind this piece of software.

Twiki is ugly, feature-light, bug-riddled, and...ugh.

> Put in place some additional anti-spam controls, like email address
> verification and no URL or IMG hyperlinks for those which have not
> posted or successfully edited at least "x" number of entries..just  
> as a
> check of sorts.

The bad news is that nobody has any time to code any special, custom  
controls.  The good news is that Mediawiki already has some similar  
controls to what you mention; configuration is almost always easier  
than coding :-).  My hope is to not go bonkers with restrictions;  
anonymous editing might be a bit much to keep up with, but Mediawiki  
does one big thing Twiki didn't: it has 'watch' functionality, so if  
you really care about a particular page, you can get an email when  
someone modifies it (this of course, is NOT an invitation to start an  
edit war with someone.)  Mediawiki also offers from-the-web reversing  
of malicious edits and mistakes, etc.

I'd encourage everyone to familiarize themselves with Wikitext, and  
those of you interested in the "how it works" side, investigate  
mediawiki itself.  There is (naturally) a lot of documentation online  
at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation


> Then Put the entire wiki as is back up porn

Nope.  Sorry.  That part is virtually non-negotiable in my book and  
I'm pretty sure Dan's as well.  You should see how many hits we get on  
the Audifans website from people/bots looking for the crap that we  
took down MONTHS ago.  It severely affects our google rankings and  
what people find when they search for Audifans.  It MAY get put up  
somewhere on a private, non-linked-to URL for wiki list members to  
look through and cull...depends on what we all think will work best  
for going through the garbage.  It may just be a matter of Dan and I  
spending some time with some clever unix commands.  We'll know more  
later today.

My intention is to use the KB for now to provide info about current  
progress, where we need help, etc.  I'll be in/out/busy all day, but  
I'll update some info on there about why mediawiki was chosen (and a  
little history about why I picked MW), and I'm hoping to create  
accounts on the wiki for people on the mailing list mid-afternoon (so  
get on the list!  Dan's already kicked off things with an initial  
email.)  My plan was to get the old stuff in, clean up some specific  
pages to represent a standard/benchmark for all content, get resources  
in place to help people with editing, and then open up 'the gates'.

Brett