"JS" == John Stracke francis+dated+1086436124.b8e8db@thibault.org writes:
Me> Wikis lower the bar for participation considerably.
JS> But doesn't it also lower the bar for pranks and such--say, JS> person A adds a piece of clipart that person B doesn't like, JS> so B modifies it surreptitiously? CVS would log things like JS> that.
So, a couple of things about this:
* Yes, it lowers the bar for abuse, too. But experience with Wikis like Wikipedia has shown that the good tends to overwhelm the bad. If you have a community of people dedicated to the idea of the project, they can "self-police" the wiki. After all, A can always revert B's changes. Or C can, or D or E or F.
I think it works because, since it's so easy to change stuff, B will get bored with abuse pretty quickly. Also, A, C, D, E, and F are more committed usually to the project, than B is to causing mayhem.
* There are a number of features in the MediaWiki software that runs most of the Wikimedia projects (and Wikitravel, by the way) to track edits and quickly detect abuse. It's hard to do things "surreptitiously".
* Recent changes * Page histories * User contributions lists * New pages lists * Upload, delete, protect
* Most of the features that could cause permanent damage, on MediaWiki sites, are reserved for special administrator users. So, for example, most people can't delete an image, a page, or whatever. They can take out all the content, but they can't delete the marker, or the history, or whatever.
There's a few pages that go over how Wikis actually can work for sharing important data. On Wikipedia, there's the replies to common objections:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections
On Meatball Wiki (a Wiki about how Wikis and other online communities work), there's a page on "Soft Security":
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SoftSecurity
...and one on limiting damage:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?LimitDamage
Anyways, lots of blather about Wiki, which is probably off-topic for both sodipodi-l and wikipedia-l. Sorry to both communities for excessive cross-posts, but I think this is an interesting topic that should probly be looked into.
~ESP