Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Angela <beesley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've been thinking this over for a few days,
and I believe the option
of reunifying meta and the Foundation wiki makes most sense.
But yeah - the separation is very annoying and wastes a lot of time. Perhaps
what is needed is a new MediaWiki feature that I'll call 'Publish this page.'
There would be no separate foundation wiki and all foundation webpages would be
maintained on meta yet also displayed on a separate static website.
A new user group would be needed, but those in the group could click 'Publish
this page' and presto! A static version of that page - in full HTML - would
then exist at
wikimediafoundation.org under a page name selected for that page
(different names would be needed between the foundation website and meta due to
the extensive use of subpages on meta for development purposes; alternatively,
only the name after the last / could be used for the static page name - I like
the second option better).
This feature could also be used for WikiJunior ; development of WikiJunior
books would still happen on Wikibooks, but we could also have a static version
of published WikiJunior books at
wikijunior.org. Parents and teachers would
feel much more comfortable sending kids to a static, yet often updated, website
instead of wiki that may have been vandalized a few seconds before the kids get
there.
I would imagine that this would also be a useful feature for Wikiversity
(publishing a sylibus from a "teacher"), Wikibooks (making a 1.0
"version" of the book as a static version), and even Wikipedia (for
"vetted" articles that have been through the wringer, have citations,
and are of a more professional caliber that the typical Wikipedia
article). In short, a very useful feature for just about any current
project.
I'm not sure if this should become a new user group permission or simply
something new for admins to play with. Certainly if there was anything
that was brought up by community concensus that should be "published",
it could be then done technically by an admin. The question would then
become if the existing admins on most projects are overwhelmed with
other issues and a new group of users with slightly more privileges than
a regular registered user should get this power or if this should simply
be with a community member that has the trust to become an admin anyway.
In some ways it would be nice to add another "level" to the heirarchy
of super-user privileges, so the jump from registered user to admin
isn't quite as drastic, or could be done in a couple of steps rather
than one.
The answer to this question would discuss both the technical issues
having to impliment this sort of feature and the social issues creating
a new class of users. Both I think are rather trivial, but I'm not
totally sure.
--
Robert Scott Horning