RE: Hosting of the cookbook

On 2004-04-05 19:37:46 +0100 Anton van Straaten 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> That's a good point.  But won't this mean that it becomes up to the 
> editors
> to integrate new material, so instead of working to "police" 
> contributions
> that don't fit, some work will have to be done for many or most
> contributions, even good ones, to make the cookbook hold together 
> rather
> than be a ragtag collection of random contributions?

Probably, but someone needs to tend a pure wiki to do that anyway. If 
this is a wiki with "schematics" on it, they ought to become a 
schematician if they will do much editing, surely?

> I've seen sites with such random collections, and they're not that 
> useful
> because there may be ten solutions to a given problem, and most or 
> all of
> them might suck.  Someone has to do editing work to correct that.  If 
> the
> original contributors are responsible and sensible, they can do at 
> least
> some of that work.

I think you missed "with sufficient time" from the list of 
requirements for contributors.

Regardless, wiki-ness doesn't prevent "someone has to do editing work 
to correct that" if you get ten partial solutions. Wiki-ness also 
introduces the possibility that the non-sucky solutions will be edited 
to suck and someone has to edit them again, too.

> It comes down to how much you trust the contributors. [...]

I disagree. I think I do not distrust the contributors more than you. 
Rather, I believe the pure wiki is requiring more effort from both 
contributors and editors than an annotation-based system.
The requirement was to make this thing easier and I don't think a pure 
wiki solution will. My experience with other open project wikis (the 
local LUG, Oekonux, GNUstep, Koha, Gobo, amongst others) suggests they 
require active maintenance and will be subject to attacks. Even if all 
contributors are friendly, there will be script-based attacks on it. 
Please consider this experience even if you don't agree with my 
interpretation if the time demands.

I don't understand the plan for making stable releases of a pure-wiki 
cookbook. Are we deferring work for later?

-- 
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
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