>>>> "JS" == John Stracke
<francis+dated+1086436124.b8e8db(a)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
--
Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel -
http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide