On 06/12/05, Mischa Peters mischa2023@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe the definition of "restricted" means something else to different people. Personally I feel that an email verification is not a restriction.
OK, maybe it is a definition thing. It seems to me that a change from "anyone can edit" to "anyone can edit, as long as they have an e-mail address, are willing to enter it on the form, and can be bothered to wait for the confirmation message" is reducing the pool of people who are able to edit, and therefore "restricting" it to those who meet the new criteria.
But perhaps it's more helpful to think of it in terms of removing the *ease* and *speed* of editting, which are after all what wikis excel at (hence "wiki-wiki", "quick"). Now, I'm happy for it to be up to administrators to reduce the advantages of the system like this, but I do think it would be a mistake for them to do so.
You can argue that if this is considered a restriction then there are already a lot of restrictions in place that made it in MediaWiki. Think, regsitering to the wiki. Think, disallow edit of a page when a user is not logged in. Think, read only wiki.
Yes, I personally think that the harder it is to contribute to a wiki, the less use is being made of the advantages of the wiki. A read-only or invitation-only wiki is just a CMS - a website managed and facilitated by software - and there are many many pieces of software probably *more* able to do that. Does that mean no-one should be allowed to adapt MediaWiki for such a role? Of course not, and no doubt useful features come about largely because people use it that way. But if you want to take advantage of it being a wiki, you have to make editting easy for as many people as you think you can cope with. IMHO, of course.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]