I personally don't understand the reasoning to want to edit other
people's
posts. Can you give an example of a good reason to edit someone's post?
It's usefull to add line feed inside a mail to answer a specific question. In wiki this can be used to obfuscate thread but it's more often correctly used.
Yes, adding line feed is useful in email. But you aren't destructively updating the email, you are making a copy of the mail, and responding to those points in your own email. This is exactly how normal forums work. I'd have to say most of the talk pages I've seen don't truly make much sense. A lot of the time they are used incorrectly, and you can't always follow the discussion (if there is actually any discussion going on at all). In a real forum you see a time trail, and a discussion that (generally) makes sense.
I understand the want to refactor discussion pages, or to summarize a discussion page. Those should be separate pages, and any changes should be a copy of the posts, not the posts themselves. I understand there is a history and anyone can follow a discussion through the history, but that is a pretty poor way of following a discussion.
Truthfully, I think its more of a detriment than a benefit to be able to edit someone's posts. I can think of a ton of bad reasons to edit another persons post, but very very few good reasons.
It would be MUCH better to have a system where the user making the post allowed/disallowed people to edit their posts. If I'm signing my posts, I don't want someone to edit it to change my opinion to side with theirs.
For
instance, if this email were a part of a thread in a forum, you could
change
it to make it look like I side with your argument, and most people
wouldn't
notice.
We have history to catch such behavior, w/o history I'll agree with you. Also what about vandalism, spam etc. A feature to disable edit of comments means than some sort of user (sysop ?) must be able to edit/remove other comments, not a good idea to give more work to sysops. It'll also raise the problem of giving more power to sysops, seeing some flame war about sysops power I doubt allowing only them to edit comments will be welcome.
Yes, I agree with you here. Vandalism and spam would definitely be a problem, and would put a burden on sysops. I don't think a system like this would work on the larger wikis. I'm sure the small and medium sized wikis would be fine with this. I'm sure most organizations that are using mediawiki internally would actually prefer being able to control this.
I guess I could always just write an extension later on for this type of functionality. I'm just playing lobbyist for smaller wikis.
Ryan Lane Naval Oceanographic Office
Lane, Ryan wrote:
I'm sure most organizations that are using mediawiki internally would actually prefer being able to control this.
If your employees are vandalizing each other's comments, I think you've got problems a wiki isn't going to solve no matter what you tack onto it.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org